Home > Essays > Whitdel's forgotten community mission
By Alonso del Arte, April 10, 2016
For roughly six years now, Whitdel Arts has been operating in the lower level of Whitdel Apartments without having to pay rent to Southwest Solutions. In return for this generosity, Whitdel Arts was going to fulfill some sort of community mission in the arts. That seems to have been the arrangement that Aaron Timlin of the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) made with Steven Gabrys of Southwest Solutions.
It made sense. There are some very knowledgeable people on the Southwest Solutions staff, but none of them consider themselves to be experts in art, hence the arrangement with CAID. Earlier this year, Gabrys sent Whitdel Arts a letter saying "It has become too difficult to determine what is going on with the art space and the community mission is being lost."
The Whitdel board could have responded with a precise statement of the original community mission and a few specific and undisputable facts to show that they have been fulfilling that community mission. Instead, they responded with a vague statement about "consistent programming" which "is a clear indication of what is happening in" the space. This sounds like not only has the community mission been lost, it has been forgotten altogether.
But let's give Whitdel the benefit of the doubt, and try to guess what the community mission was and see if they have fulfilled that. If the community mission had a component about showing the work of talented young artists who live in the neighborhood, I can tell you right now that Whitdel Arts has failed. If the community mission had a component about showing a diverse roster of artists, Whitdel Arts has failed at that, too. In the period from 2011 to 2013, Whitdel exhibited the following black artists:
And the following Latino artist:
The homage to Prof. Gilda Snowden in early 2014 raised Whitdel's numbers for diversity of exhibited artists, but if we ignore that exhibition, the numbers barely improve in the two years since.
Or maybe the community mission was something about engaging the community with art, enabling neighborhood residents to see contemporary art without having to leave the neighborhood. Whitdel has failed at that, too. Most of the people who come to Whitdel's opening receptions are white people from the suburbs.
And that's just the way the Whitdel board likes it, because supposedly southwest Detroit is a very dangerous place, and the women who gallery-sit on Saturdays supposedly need to be on high alert for the neighborhood residents, who are supposedly a bunch of criminals ready to commit crimes of opportunity. If the neighborhood is so damn dangerous, why not just move the gallery to a safer neighborhood in the suburbs? Oh yeah, I forgot, the rent.
Although this is not a terribly puritanical community, I seriously doubt the residents were much interested in Crotch, an exhibit from a few months ago with the noble goal of starting "a discussion on modern sexuality and changing gender roles," but instead it just came across as a desperate attempt to be edgy and relevant.
The Whitdel experiment has been an utter failure. My advice: The gallery needs to be closed down, renamed, and reopened under the authority of a community board charged with a precisely stated community mission and evaluated at periodic intervals for compliance with that mission.
In my opinion, as someone who has for several months now wished for a space where I can exhibit the work of talented young artists I've met in this neighborhood, the new community mission should be to exhibit the work of those talented young artists, pro-actively seeking those talented black and Latino artists who are casually and unfairly ignored by so many galleries in this city, side-by-side with international artists, not just from Europe, but also from Africa, Asia and South America.
One of the reasons that black and Latino artists don't get a fair shake in art galleries is that they are evaluated on the weakness of their resumes rather than the strength of their portfolios.
A white artist in her 30s already has a decent listing of previous exhibits, and she makes sure to note who juried each exhibit. An exhibition juror can casually dismiss black and Latino applicants and claim the rejection was due to a lack of artistic quality. Systemic racism becomes a self-reinforcing vicious cycle, and Whitdel Arts has been a part of this problem, not a part of the solution.
I believe that just bringing talented minority artists from the neighborhood to exhibit in the gallery would go a long way towards a community mission component of community engagement. Whatever new community mission is agreed upon, periodic evaluation and assessment would be required to make sure that it doesn't just fall through the cracks again.