David Simon’s TV series follows the fight against social housing in 1980s Yonkers, New York – but, as Kevin Baker reveals, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the sordid American history of kicking black people out of their neighbourhoods

An estate in Detroit's Indian Village will be featured on tonight's PBS Series "Genealogy Roadshow."

How does it compare to other cities?

by Naomi Heller We are so pleased to share this informative two-part article about the history of play, written by Naomi Heller. Naomi is a playground designer focused on creating spaces and object…

In 1969, a group of friends travelled from Detroit to Chicago to pick up an ancient, cumbersome Harris offset printing press from a second-hand printer dealer. Back in Detroit, another group scouted a space on the ground floor of an industrial building on Michigan Avenue. Darkroom equipment and supp

A section of the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera (completed in 1933), commissioned by Edsel Ford and museum director William Valentiner.

This is the first exhibit to focus on the time Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo spent in Detroit. It's a big step for the Detroit Institute of Arts as it recovers from the tumult of the city's bankruptcy.

I keep coming back to Detroit. It’s bizarre how photogenic the downfall of America’s industrial powerhouse can be. However there’s an eerie and unwanted sense of responsibility to be felt when looking through these before & after photographs of Detroit taken in 1973 and 2010 by the same photographer, Dave Jordano. I could browse through endless…

The shy and mighty currently on the lookout for masterpieces now have a fresh object of desire: the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is effectively under the ownership of a city that’s nearly $15 billion in debt.

A mogul from Texas is using the country's least aspirational city as the backdrop for his next global lifestyle company. Shinola, the $225 million experiment in manufactured authenticity.

There is such a cliche about artists and madness. Perhaps there’s a bit of truth to it: people who struggle sometimes see the world creatively; creative people may struggle to fit into the boxes that define the norm.

The artist's recent lens-based textiles are currently on view in “Trying to Remember” at Detroit’s Library Street Collective

Soda History The history of soda is longer than you might think. The term “soft drink” is derived from “soda water”, dating as far back as 1798. Joseph Priestly invented carbonated water in 1767, when he first discovered a method of infusing water with carbon dioxide (CO2) by suspending a bowl of water over a…Continue reading →

A winter storm headed to Metro Detroit this week is expected to break records, with up to 18 inches on the way, according to AccuWeather. Here’s a look at the biggest snowfalls in the history of the region.

Similar to Detroit, the decay of Braddock in Pennsylvania is most probably in a more run-down condition. This small steel town has seen a massive decline in investment, with very little effort shown to redevelop the area – as the pictures below will show. Beautiful homes, businesses and entire streets have been stripped of their […]

Kwame Brathwaite documented burgeoning black art and political movements in New York – most notably, the “Black is Beautiful” movement that encouraged black people to accept and celebrate their natural features.

Fifty years ago Detroit was among the richest cities in the world and offered perhaps the best quality of life of any city in America. Today, it is bankrupt, the most dangerous place in the country, boasts 78,000 abandoned homes, and 47% of its people cannot even read or write.

There were many sieges during the American Revolution. Some are well-known even to novice students of the war, like Boston and Yorktown; others are...

Jacobus Vrel is a ghostly figure in art history because, up to this moment, there is almost no official data about him.

Barnstorming refers to an aerial display or exhibition performed by pilots flying small aircraft, typically biplanes. These exhibitions typically involved pilots performing stunts, such as wing walking, and giving airplane rides to public members for a fee to attract attention, leading to "stunt flying." The word "barnstorming" comes from the…

DETROIT — The Detroit Institute of Arts’s major exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit closes on Sunday. This show was in the works for a decade, long before the city’s bankruptcy and the grand bargain, which shifted the ownership of the art from the city to the museum.

Many photos of the past present everything prior to the modern era as stoic and well mannered. The photos collected here turn that concept on its head by showing some of the more candid moments from history that didn’t make it into the history books.

Albums, polka-dots and teddy bears aren't typically what you see as exterior house decor, but they've become a staple on Heidelberg St. in Detroit as part…

Detroit’s haunting decline has been so well documented by urban explorers that to the outside world, it might seem like it’s the only thing to know about this once great industrial metropolis. And yet undeniably, it’s vast urban abandonment is intensely interesting. My latest guilty fascination is the Detroit’s renaissance revival theatre that has ended up…

History is full of unrecognized women. That's not the most startling observation in the world; scribes throughout history have begrudged women any space in their important records of Kings And Emperors Doing Things, because ladies were just there to…

Someone in Detroit celebrated Columbus Day this year by taping an ax to a bust commemorating the explorer, splashing on some red paint for full dramatic effect.

Maine is the closest U.S. state to Africa.

There's faded grandeur. And then there's Detroit. Once the fourth-largest city in the US, its spectacular economic and social decline is writ large in the..

Two friends shyly approach the photographer, Lodz. Porter Nat Gutman, Warsaw. Ernst Kaufmann, center, and unidentified Zionist youth, wearing clogs while learning construction techniques in a quarry, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands. Smiling children, Mukacevo. Jewish kid. Sara,…

Beautiful and insightful, the illustrations of the German naturalist helped shape a new understanding of the world

Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), Zürich 1741 - Putney bei London 1825 Der Nachtmahr / The Nightmare Detroit Institute of Arts Working during the height of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason,” the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli) instead chose to depict darker, irrational forces in his famous painting The Nightmare. In Fuseli’s startling composition, a woman bathed in white light stretches across a bed, her arms, neck, and head hanging off the end of the mattress. An apelike figure crouches on her chest while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils emerges from the shadowy background. The painting was first displayed at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1782, where it shocked, titillated, and frightened exhibition visitors and critics. Unlike many of the paintings that were then popular and successful at the Royal Academy exhibitions, Fuseli’s The Nightmare has no moralizing subject. The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination. It certainly has a literary character and the various figures demonstrate Fuseli’s broad knowledge of art history, but The Nightmare’s subject is not drawn from history, the Bible, or literature. The painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna). The figure that sits upon the woman’s chest is often described as an imp or an incubus, a type of spirit said to lie atop people in their sleep or even to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women. Fuseli’s painting is suggestive but not explicit, leaving open the possibility that the woman is simply dreaming. Yet, her dream appears to take frightening, physical form in the shapes of the incubus and the horse. According to Fuseli’s friend and biographer John Knowles, who saw the first drawing Fuseli made for the composition in 1781, the horse was not present in the drawing but added to the painting later. Although it is tempting to understand the painting’s title as a punning reference to the horse, the word “nightmare” does not refer to horses. Rather, in the now obsolete definition of the term, a mare is an evil spirit that tortures humans while they sleep. As Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defined it, a mare or “mara, [is] a spirit that, in heathen mythology, was related to torment or to suffocate sleepers. A morbid oppression in the night resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” Thus, Fuseli’s painting may in fact be understood as embodying the physical experience of chest pressure felt during a dream-state. Through his use of composition and chiaroscuro – the strategic juxtaposition of sharply contrasting light and shadow—Fuseli heightened the drama and uncertainty of his scene. However, unlike the slightly earlier painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, which utilized chiaroscuro to symbolize the enlightening power of rational observation, Fuseli’s The Nightmare instead shows the futility of light to penetrate or explain the darker realms of the unconscious. In The Nightmare, the single light source coming in from the right, the curtains and tassels in the background, and the shortened, stage-like foreground also add to the work’s theatricality. The red drapery falling off the edge of the bed even suggests a river of blood as it might be symbolically enacted on stage in a play or an opera, adding morbid undertones to the painting’s already dark themes. Throughout his career, Fuseli painted and illustrated scenes from Shakespeare and Milton, and his art has a consistent sense of literary, at times even erudite drama that reveals his classical education (after completing his studies, Fuseli had been ordained as a pastor in the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church before his political activities in Zürich effectively forced him into exile in 1761). The Nightmare’s stark mixture of horror, sexuality, and morbidity has insured its enduring notoriety. In January 1783, The Nightmare was engraved by Thomas Burke and distributed by the publisher John Raphael Smith. The relatively low price of this reproduction following on the heels of the attention the work received at the Royal Academy helped to distribute the image to a wider audience. Fuseli later painted at least three more variations with the same title and subject. The Nightmare became an icon of Romanticism and a defining image of Gothic horror, inspiring the poet Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) and the writers Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe among many others. From the start, caricaturists also adopted Fuseli’s composition, and political figures from Napoleon Bonaparte to President George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have all been lampooned in satirical versions of Fuseli’s painting. Essay by Dr. Noelle Paulson Source: www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticis...