Washington Post reviews MOCAD's Shrinking Cities exhibit

The Washington Post takes a long, hard look at the Shrinking Cities exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, calling it "dense and elemental and important."

Excerpt:

Throughout both parts of the show -- the more sociological and documentary pieces at Cranbrook, and the artistic "interventions" on display at MOCAD -- there is a profound sense of the paradoxical. Urban decay is ugly, but ruins are beautiful. Shrinking cities are emptied of their vitality, and yet that seems to unleash unpredictable artistic forces, and eccentricities.

It's unlikely that "Slim's Bike" (a bicycle decorated to baroque excess by one of Detroit's more colorful citizens) or "The Heidelberg Project" (a collection of old houses encrusted with trash, dolls, stuffed animals, etc., by Detroit artist Tyree Guyton) would exist except in a city too wounded to care about suppressing its creative and anarchic instincts. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the spectrum of creativity abhors gray spaces.

Read the entire article here.