Andrew Moore’s photographs of the Motor City are sublime—beautiful, operatic in scale and drama, tragic yet offering a glimmer of hope. They are the subject of Detroit Disassembled, an exhibition organized by the Akron Art Museum and currently on view at the Queens Museum of Art in New York. On Sunday, September 18 the Queens Museum of Art is hosting an opening reception.
Spending three months in Detroit during 2008 and 2009, Moore found its citizens’ mood to be resilient and resourceful rather than tragic. The city is the ultimate case study for urban blight, an affliction that has infected most American cities, and for the survival of an industrial city in a post-industrial age.
Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore has garnered national attention. In August 2011 Mike Rubin’s “Capturing the Idling of the Motor City” ran in the New York Times. In the preview Rubin wrote, “His large-scale prints—some up to 5 feet by 6 feet – are sumptuous and painterly, rich in texture and color: the emerald carpet of moss growing on the floor of Henry Ford’s office at the Model T plant, the pumpkin-orange walls of a vandalized classroom at Cass Technical High School, the crimson panels of a former F.B.I. shooting range.”
In addition to the national attention the exhibition has received, the exhibition book “Detroit Disassembled” is now in its third printing and essayist Philip Levine was recently named the Poet Laureate of the United States. “Detroit Disassembled” is available for purchase in the Museum Store.
This exhibition is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major gift from Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell with additional support from the John A. McAlonan Fund of Akron Community Foundation. The accompanying publication is underwritten by Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell with additional funding from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
The presentation of this exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art is made possible through the generosity of the Charina Endowment Fund and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.