Last Saturday the 600 block of Divisadero — past a burgeoning Western Addition gourmet ghetto — became a temporary theater of creative endeavor. In addition to the usual cafe throngs, artists were at work on whitewashed walls, a cherry picker lift beeped while mounting a giant blue photograph on the face of a building, and pedestrian spectators milled about, snapping pics of the action with cell phones. It was a 21st-century plein air art spectacle, with boozy marketing might — the event sponsored by art-friendly, all-caps vodka brand ABSOLUT.
Open Canvas, as it’s dubbed, entailed the company renting storefronts and exterior walls. Nineteen artists, most curated and from New York and LA, one the local winner of a submission contest, were provided with this temporary venue — it’ll be up for a week or so (marketing materials are unclear about dates). The Saturday afternoon launch was less about finished works than revealing the creative act publicly. Alicia McCarthy was deeply focused on a colorful abstract mural of woven painted lines being realized with a group of friends, while Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor got a temporary portrait studio in a side street garage, the fresh paintings collecting on the wall (he maintained ownership, FYI). Matthew McGrath and friends were installing a vertical garden on the façade of an auto shop.
Matthew McGrath installing; photo: Deborah Svoboda
David Benjamin Sherry installing; photo: Deborah Svoboda
Public art was once most associated with civic organizations, a publicly-funded official city imperative to beautify and honor. But as the art world faces the ominous possibility that the stellar public art collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts will potentially be auctioned off to support city coffers, the equation shifts — the private sector’s support of art has an increasingly powerful role in shaping urban life.