A Beautiful Detroit Begins With You

The design installation we (www.heritageco2. com and www.richardgagedesignstudio.com) are working on for the DIFFA fundraiser in Detroit is turning out to be a fun collaborative project. I love collaborative projects, especially with smart, creative people. I feel like I'm pushing that old playground merry-go-round and with each person that grabs a bar and starts running and pushing with me, we get that thing going faster and faster and then everybody jumps on and you get that incredible rush from the centrifugal force everyone's created. So first Rick and I start it spinning with the 'ole what-can-we-make-with-what- we've-got at our two shops for this project? We just got all those gears from Brimfield, colorful and Detroitish. Will the client we bought them for, Detroit Science Center (www.detroitsciencecenter.org) help push? Yes? We've got it going now. We need a big table for the center, Charles (www.dunlapdesigngroup.com) bought this great big steel one from me, I know he'll be game to loan it. It's picking up speed. I have been looking for an opportunity to use one of David King's reclaimed lumber assemblages large scale, he'll play for sure. I'm breaking a sweat. Wait! I've got that old Detroit Public Works stencil c. 1950 Jon Teschendorf found for me. I have been talking about that dang stencil for years, how it's the perfect message for some business venture or other, how we should make lots of signs with it on found lumber, old doors, whatever and create this buzz with that great message! We are running all out. And, now I have the perfect place to use it. The perfect audience to share the message. The timing has never been more right. So much momentum building from the urban gardening phenomenon and what it's done for so many struggling neighborhoods, the river improvements and the Dequindre Cut, recent renovations of beloved landmarks like the Eastern Market, the DIA and the Book Cadillac. Jump on everybody! From that still fresh shame of a crashing automotive industry and every news agency making us the poster child of the national economic crisis..could it have been any bleaker than that image of the man frozen in an abandoned elevator shaft on the front page? And yet, here we are movies everywhere, car companies with profits, beautiful summer days! I was reminded (thanks John Jessmon) of those incredible Leonard Cohen lyrics today, "There is a crack, a crack in everything...that's how the light gets in!" Well, we sure know where the cracks are, how about looking for the light now.

Oh yeah, about that DPW stencil. I'm sure it was developed for some renewal campaign Detroit launched. It has been hanging in my studio for many years now. It says, "A Beautiful Detroit Begins With You." I created a domain for it, just beginning to think about what I might do with it. So far I've got John Jessmon (www.logo27.com) making t-shirts to give to each donor who sits at our table and more to sell at the upcoming Arts Beats and Eats festival in Royal Oak. That's where I am beginning, where can, no, where will, you begin? Give it some thought. Meanwhile, I'm on this super fun, spinning ride, with all these great people and it's making me really happy right now, so I'm gonna keep it going while you're thinking about it, and hanging on for all I've got.