Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
On the Plaza of American Life, where does 26-foot Marilyn stand? For now, she’s straddling Palm Springs tourists. Is she this years’ ceramic pink flamingo replacement, soon to be on everyone’s front lawn? Let’s hope so. America’s new moral umbrella is Monroe’s revenge. Oow, some do like it hot.
Viewed today, Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals might have prefigured Detroit’s downfall, but also envision a renaissance. It harkens to the earth, the races living and working in harmony, where sections of the city have been cleared of distressed neighborhoods and allowed to regrow with food crops, grasses and trees.
An urban conceptual art installation called The Heidelberg Project, named after its street location in the formerly central core of Detroit, Michigan, transforms a neighborhood first devastated by the 1967 riots, plagued by unemployment, poverty, financial redlining, racial segregation, then abandoned, burned, and largely demolished but for a few homes set among open grassy fields.