Contemporary art meets historic architecture in a new virtual exhibition, which is digitally adding artworks to some of Detroit’s landmark buildings.
The SITE: Art and Architecture in the Digital Space exhibition – set up by the city’s Library Street Collective gallery – features sculpture, light installations and paintings, all of which have been re-created in digital form and placed throughout Detroit’s 120-year-old State Savings Bank, designed by McKim, Mead & White.
The gallery worked together with photographer James Haefner, using his images of Detroit’s historic buildings as backdrops for the exhibition. After standing empty for 20 years, the State Savings Bank was partially restored in 2014 and reopened to the public four years later.
Its grand Beaux-Arts hall is now home to a virtual version of Daniel Arsham’s bronze eroded Venus de Milo. Elsewhere in the building, Phillip K Smith III’s Portal light piece digitally beams out from the bank’s weathered walls, alongside Rachel Rossin’s hybrid hologram-painting, Leda, and Kennedy Yanko’s industrial SHELTER sculpture.
Library Street Collective plans to host more editions of the exhibition in other buildings across Detroit in the coming weeks. It will donate 10% of the proceeds from works sold to the city’s Ruth Ellis Center – a non-profit that provides support to LGBTQ youth and young adults of colour facing housing issues.
