“What about Flint?”

Make:Art:Work, American

“What about Flint?”, 2016

The Detroit art collective, Make:Art:Work, created this neon sign as part of a Rube Goldberg kinetic installation organized across five American cities and regions: New Hampshire, Phoenix, Atlanta, Oakland and Detroit. In the project, titled Common Ground, each artist or collective had to design, fabricate, and film their part of the Rube Goldberg machine in coordination with the other cities. In Detroit, members of Make:Art:Work designed a series of fiery displays which culminated in explosion of a small house illuminated with this neon sign, “What about Flint?” The group’s machine was a direct commentary on art’s ability to destroy the institutions that have failed citizens. By challenging themselves to work across geographic boundaries, the various artists and makers of Common Ground connected through art, technology, and most importantly, by talking to each other. Label by Kelly Conway

Click here to see Common Ground’s Rube Goldberg in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?  v=WMrZ0HiRfOo

A Body of Water

Desiree Duell, American

A Body of Water, 2015

Desiree Duell is a native of Flint, Michigan, whose artworks engages disenfranchised communities and encourage liberation. Body of Water is a community-based installation in which Duell traces the outlines of Flint children and then fills in or surrounds the outlines with the water bottles used by Flintstones instead of their tap-water, creating bodies from water bottles. Some of these bottles are filled with contaminated water while others are aposematically blue from LED lights. This striking project reveals the huge burden placed on Flint by visualizing the amount of water people go through and how that translates from the tap to a plastic bottle, trading lead poisoning for plastic pollution. The combination of countless plastic bottles with the outlines of children ties together the dangers of lead poisoning with the potable water crisis, painting the children as crime scene victims, which they very well are because of government negligence. Label by Tori Erisman

Flint Water Crisis

Justin Oltesvig, American

Flint Water Crisis, 2016

Oltesvig has been displeased with how the Michigan government has handled the Flint water crisis. He illustrated an upper-class man (Michigan Governor Rick Snyder) using Flint’s water plant tower as a toilet to highlight the repulsive water that these people have been forced to live with. The plane flying a banner in the sky reads “Drink Coke it’s safer than water” to bring up the fact that soda is for once healthier than Flint water. This piece highlights the topics of deindustrialization and environmental racism from this week by mirroring the shift in water with a shift in wealth. Oltesvig has illustrated a shift from a poor community to a richer community, which is symbolizing the shift of clean drinking water away from Flint. A Flint Vehicle sign can be seen behind a building highlighting the deindustrialization of the area because of the water system. Flint water was causing factory parts to corrode so the city diverted clean water only to the factory, not to the surrounding community. Label by Olivia Falb

Flint is Family Series

LaToya Ruby Frazier, American, born 1982

Flint is Family, 2016

LaToya Ruby Frasier is a multi-media artists who’s bodies of work center on social justice and the American experience to address urgent issues of politics and cultural change. Her collection Flint is Family, follows Shea Cobb and her family through her life in Flint, and provides and intimate look into the lives of those still affected by Flint’s contaminated water. Frasier directly connects and interacts with her subject and those experiencing environmental injustice, making her work particularly impactful as she takes the time to not only represent Flint, but amplify the voices its residents- an essential element of art and environmental justice. Not only does Frasier capture Cobb and those demanding justice, but she moves a step further to make actual change in conjunction with her work, bringing an atmospheric water generator to deliver clean water to the people she photographed, establishing an important connection to the place she used in her art. Label by Molly McCarthy Flood