Kresge honoree Scott Hocking: "Detroit is on a threshold"

Long before "ruin porn" became a fashionable hobby, artists like our own Scott Hocking risked life and limb (not to mention, arrest) to explore broken-down and abandoned buildings, which became the subjects for his documentary photography and site-specific installations.

Hocking, a 2011 Kresge Award Winner, reveals much in this interview with Sarah Margolis-Pineo, herself a curator at the Cranbrook Art Museum. It's a look within the eye of the artist -- touching on everything from Hocking's passion for abandoned buildings, to his place in Detroit's rich history of D.I.Y creators.

Excerpt:

Everybody, myself included, who has been making artwork in the city hasn't had resources to do anything but making with what you have. Sometimes you're living in squalor and trying to scrape by… The Cass Corridor people got a lot of notoriety, but shit, there were artists in the 1980s living inside the Broderick Tower and Fort Wayne, and had studios in random skyscrapers that were virtually vacant because no one could afford to do anything in there. These artists may have not gotten the same attention, but that lineage is all the same--trying to use the spaces that have been neglected because creative people see potential there.

Read the interview here.