After visiting Detroit in fall 2012, Barbara Luderowski and Michael Olijnyk, co-curators of “Detroit: Artists in Residence,” recognized a kinship between what artists were doing there and the Mattress Factory’s mission to encourage experimentation and risk-taking. This exhibition, featuring the results of a two-city collaboration, was an appropriate choice to celebrate the 35th anniversary of an institution whose founders pioneered Pittsburgh’s North Side when it was segregated and rampant with criminal and drug activity. Detroit and Pittsburgh are part of the same dying industrial fabric, though the latter has discovered a way to survive despite the loss of its steel industry. The exhibition was also a timely counter-measure to all of the bad news coming from Detroit, the once successful capitol of the auto industry now reduced to bankruptcy and a symbol of economic gloom. A booming metropolis in 1950, with nearly two million people, today Detroit has shrunk to a population of less than 700,000.…see the entire review in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
