About Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead
About
Mobile Homestead is a permanent artwork by the late artist Mike Kelley, located at MOCAD. The sculpture is a full-scale replica of the 1950s ranch-style home where Kelley grew up. It is the only work of public art ever made by Kelley and the first major installation of his work in his hometown.
Following Kelley’s wishes, the ground floor rooms of the home are a community gallery and gathering space featuring exhibitions and programs created by and for a diverse public that reflect the cultural tastes and interests of the local community. The home’s white clapboard facade and front room can detach from the rest of the structure and travel as a trailer into communities throughout Detroit on missions in service of the public good.
In contrast to its public side, the Mobile Homestead has a private side – a series of underground tunnels and rooms forty feet below the home. Kelley specified that this subterranean area be off-limits to the public and “reserved for secret rites of an anti-social nature.”
According to 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…”
Rather than projecting ideas into the world, the Mobile Homestead invites the community to contribute ideas. Visitors to the house are encouraged to suggest programs, projects, and exhibitions.
History
The Mobile Homestead was born from ideas that Mike Kelly (b. Detroit, 1954, d. Los Angeles, 2012) developed over a lengthy period. Kelley’s birthplace of Detroit has always been a locus of his practice. For years, he entertained buying the home where he spent his childhood, located on Palmer Rd. in Westland, a suburb of Detroit that primarily housed workers for the Big Three automakers. When the current owner refused to sell, Kelley produced a facsimile of the house on wheels. In collaboration with MOCAD and Artangle, he completed this first phase of Mobile Homestead in 2010.
Following the project’s first phase, Mobile Homestead made its maiden voyage from MOCAD in Detroit to the ‘mothership,’ his original home in the suburbs. Symbolically, the return trip reverses the ‘white flight’ of the 1960s when the decline of the automobile industry and increasing racial tensions caused an exodus of the middle class from the city to the surrounding suburbs. The Mobile Homestead used Michigan Ave. as the primary route for this voyage, making stops at historically, culturally, and personally significant sites for Kelley.
On its way down Michigan Avenue, one of Detroit’s main arteries and passageway to the western suburbs, the Mobile Homestead passed through some of the city’s most historic neighborhoods, such as the old Irish area of Corktown; 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.
Kelley filmed the entire round-trip voyage, resulting in a video trilogy screened at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. The three films are documentary-style videos chronicling the ordinary lives and communities of people who live and work along Michigan Ave., capturing a moment when the city is questioning its post-industrial prospects.
Phase two of the Mobile Homestead project saw the construction of the permanent part of Mobile Homestead at MOCAD. Kelley attended to the details up to the final days of his life in January 2012. His attention to the project and the timing of his final approval of the plans made it clear that it should carry on without him, and the project concluded in April 2013.
As Kelley intended, the Mobile Homestead hosts countless exhibitions and public programs planned by and for the local community.
Support
Artangel commissioned Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in association with MOCAD, LUMA Foundation, and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts with the generous support of the Artangel International Circle. The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts supports Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead.
