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MOCAD is devastated to learn of the death of honored and valued artist Mike Kelley. His importance and generosity to Detroit, his birthplace, and to MOCAD, where he was working on a major project, cannot be overestimated. We will remember an impish, deeply thoughtful and provocative man whose art embraced all sides of the human psyche. Rest in peace, Mike. Rest in peace.
Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, 2010. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Corine Vermeulen.
Mobile Homestead is a major new work by Mike Kelley. It's both a public sculpture and a private, personal architecture – based on the artist's childhood home on Palmer Road in Westland, a neighborhood which primarily housed workers for the Big Three auto makers: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
On Saturday, September 25, 2010, Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead made its maiden voyage from its new home in Midtown Detroit (on the grounds of MOCAD) to return to the original Kelley home in the suburbs.
On its way down Michigan Avenue, one of Detroit's main arteries and passageway to the western suburbs, the mobile home passed through some of the city's most historic neighborhoods such as the old Irish area of Cork Town; Dearborn, the home of the Ford motor company, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (Ford's personal collection of homes and structures associated with great Americans such as Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Rosa Parks); Inkster; Wayne (where Kelley attended Catholic school); and finally Westland where the former Kelley family home still stands.
In a largely disinvested city with many abandoned houses and dilapidated buildings, Mobile Homestead enacts a reversal of the 'white flight' that took place in Detroit following the inner city race riots of the 1960s. It does so at a time when the city is exploring new options of renewal by assessing its singular post-industrial conditions in an attempt to articulate a new model for American cities.
The sculpture which almost exactly replicates the vernacular architecture of working class neighborhoods in the American Midwest, brings the suburbs back into the city, and as it travels – on specific missions – the mobile home performs various kinds of community services, establishing a permanent dialogue with the community that houses it.
Mike Kelley has also produced a video documentary that focuses on the people and communities who live and work along Michigan Avenue. A 'trailer' for the film was shown at MOCAD as part of the launch events on September 25, 2010.
The project will be fully completed in 2013, when the mobile home will be attached to an altered reconstruction of the Kelley home, to function as a community space.
Mobile Homestead is artist Mike Kelley's first public art project anywhere and the first major permanent installation of his work in his hometown. This project is also the first commission by Artangel in the United States and has been produced with support from the LUMA Foundation and in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The work is also the first contemporary artwork especially commissioned for the Midtown Neighborhood of Detroit.
Mike Kelley: "Mobile Homestead covertly makes a distinction between public art and private art, between the notions that art functions for the social good, and that art addresses personal desires and concerns. Mobile Homestead does both: it is simultaneously geared toward community service and anti-social private sub-cultural activities. It has a public side and a secret side..."
An Artangel Commission with LUMA Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). This project is made possible with the support of the Artangel International Circle.