Art busting out of the rubble here in Detroit (with slideshow)

Our fair city is no stranger to the New York Times. From auto bailouts to a $100 house, Detroit hangs out in the headlines over there on a regular basis. This time they were in town checking out our art scene. The creative, the interesting, and the actual. It’s all happening here.

Excerpt:

Detroit is plagued by all the urban problems that make it fodder for big-picture editorializing and
cop shows. Its long-dwindling population and landscape of abandoned
buildings have made it a singular — or perhaps prophetic — case study in
Rust Belt decline. But its particular brand of civic and economic decay
has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized
movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something
out of the rubble.

Maker Faire, the California festival for tinkerers and conceptualists, made its Detroit debut — albeit in nearby Dearborn — last weekend; TEDx, a brainstorming conference will arrive in September; and Matthew Barney will perform after that. Banksy
has already been. Two weeks ago Detroit hired a film, culture and
special-events liaison to occupy a new position in the office of Mayor Dave Bing. The city that birthed the assembly-line age is now cultivating a slew of handmade salvagers, and it has not gone unnoticed.

“There’s an excitement here,” said Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher
of Make magazine, which spawned Maker Faire. “There’s a sense that it’s a
frontier again, that it’s open, that you can do things without a lot of
people telling you, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ” Maker Faire follows that
ethos; it drew over 22,000 people for demonstrations of wind-powered
cars and fire-spewing bicycles to the parking lot of the Henry Ford
Museum.

Read the entire article here.

Check out the slideshow here.