Detroit On My Mind

Detroit is very much in the news lately.  So much in the news that when I was recently in Detroit I watched one of the local news affiliates spend several minutes interviewing a national news anchor about how much Detroit is in the news.  Like many things in Detroit it was hard to look away from, but dumbfounding at the same time.

There is much to love about Detroit.  I was born there, but raised in a nearby suburb.  Most of us when we refer to being from Detroit really mean a suburb.  But Pleasant Ridge or Ferndale or Oak Park don't mean anything to the rest of the world.  Detroit does.

It's frustrating to see people speculate about the city I think of as my hometown when it's obvious they've never spent any time there.  Many people think they know Detroit.  They've seen the "ruin porn" and the streets that have been allowed to decay and they hear about crime and poverty and the embarrassing level of racial segregation.  They maybe have some nostalgia for Motown and Mustangs, so they think they know Detroit.

The truth is I barely know Detroit.  It's been a long time since I called Michigan home, and when I go back I'm a visitor now.  A visitor with a great deal of affection for the whole area, and I'm delighted to discover things there both old and new.  Detroit is many things, none of them simple.  The kind of sweeping generalizations many want to make leave too much out, and often the best parts.

Over and Out (Babble)

The final, last little bits of shutting down the Arnold Klein Gallery finally took place this week.  My poor mom has been working for months at the Sisyphean task of clearing out thousands of books and pieces of art and the countless odds and ends that went into 40 years of running an art gallery.  The big closing day show and party was back on Valentine’s Day, but between the amount of stuff that needed to be organized and moved and my father’s illness it’s taken until now to finally be done.  I’m still not sure how my mom managed it, but my mom is amazing like that.

So as one final tribute to my parents and all their decades of hard work running an art gallery in a city that did not make that easy, here is the short film my brother, Barrett, made that we viewed at the closing party.  My mom is great, and how adorable is my dad?  At the party most of the things my mom said in the film were hard to hear because they usually followed some funny gesture of my dad’s that made everyone laugh.  I love my parents.  And I’m proud of them.  If you have a few minutes this little movie is totally worth your time.


And I have been trying for days to embed this video and it won’t stick to my blog for some reason, so just click this little link and you will be in YouTube land watching which is just as easy as clicking the play button on an embedded video, so don’t miss out just because it’s a link!  Click!  Enjoy!
Arnold Klein Gallery turns 40!

Goodnight Gallery (Babble)

I remember years ago telling my friend, Linda, how much I enjoyed reading Goodnight Moon to Aden from the same copy that was read to me.  Linda’s children are much older than my own, and she smiled as I talked, and then she said, “Oh, Goodnight Moon.  You never know while it’s happening when you are reading it for the last time.” 

That thought has stayed with me more powerfully than almost any quote I’ve ever come across.  It encapsulates so much of what it means to raise children.  There is so much joy and chaos and repetition and change, and just as you think some routine or quirk or circumstance will continue indefinitely, it ends, usually without fanfare or notice.  One day the baby is sucking his fingers incessantly, and the next he stops, and eventually it’s hard to remember it was ever a concern.  Despite thousands of digital photographs and home videos much of what is ending goes undocumented.  We often don’t get the benefit of acknowledging certain endings, because it just happens that one day you stop pulling Goodnight Moon off the shelf.

But some goodbyes are very clear and planned for.  This Valentine’s Day was one such ending for our family.  My parents owned and operated their own art gallery in a suburb of Detroit for nearly all of my life.  The Arnold Klein Gallery opened on Valentine’s Day in 1971, and 40 years to the day it officially closed its doors.  It was time, because my mom is ready to move on to other projects, and both my parents deserve more freedom in their schedules after so many years of running their own business, but their contribution to the area will be missed.

What the Arnold Klein Gallery managed to do was special, and a great inspiration to me and how I run my own store.  My parents were not good business people in the sense that they generated wealth.  Money is important and you need enough to support yourself and your family, but beyond that I don’t think it is the measure of success in a business.  My parents struggled along with everyone else in Detroit as fluctuations in the auto industry dragged all commerce up and down.  That my mom and dad kept an art gallery viable for 40 years is amazing. 

But what is more amazing is that they stayed in business that long while being honest and compassionate in a field that often isn’t.  My parents love art.  They care about conserving things that are beautiful and encouraging fellow artists to create.  Those ideals always meant more than money.  The Arnold Klein Gallery was a place where you could get trustworthy appraisals, a perfect archival framing job, and see some of the finest work currently being produced in the area alongside stunning prints from the past.  It was a place that cared about art and artists in a way I’ve never seen anyplace else.  It was unique, just like my parents.

All the preparations for the final show were a great deal of fun.  For a bittersweet occasion I have to say we laughed a lot.  Both my brothers and their families were there, along with my family and a couple of cousins and an aunt and uncle and the world’s cutest dog.  Everyone helped to hang things from the walls and ceiling and make decorations.

It looked great.  It was fun without being too silly.

This was the wall of gallery memorabilia, complete with announcements from past shows, photos, articles, and portraits of my parents done by Donella Vogel:

The final show of art was interesting.  My dad had in mind back when he first opened the gallery that one day when they closed he wanted to have a show of canceled prints and lithographs.  Back in the 1800’s when most of the etchings he had on display were made, artists would finish an edition by crossing it out and producing one more (usually unsigned) to prove it was concluded and to prevent others in the future from possibly trying to print additional copies and pass them off as part of the original set.  In my dad’s words he saw it as a show of, “Canceled etchings, canceled prints, canceled gallery.”

And then there was the big wall of Valentines.  There were hundreds of handmade Valentines so that anyone who wanted to could simply take one home with them to remember the gallery by.

The party on Valentine’s Day was a big success.  We couldn’t have asked for a nicer send off.  The place was packed with people there to say goodbye to the gallery and wish my parents well.  It was funny talking to so many people who still remember me at my children’s ages.  I played viola for background music.  My brother, Barrett, showed a 16 minute movie he made of interviews with my parents about their 40 years in business that was touching and funny.  My sister-in-law, Deepanjana, graciously served the wine all night.  The kids wove in and out through the crowds to help themselves to cookies and crackers.  The food was fabulous.  My mom baked cookies, but I couldn’t believe how many friends brought dishes to share.

In the end what makes things important is people.  I love that my parents worked in the gallery together.  I enjoyed playing in the gallery with my brothers growing up.  Watching my own children and their cousin running around that same space was extremely moving to me.  There was a lot of love and affection in the Arnold Klein Gallery.  Valentine’s Day could not have been a more perfect occasion to associate with it.  Here are some of the people I love best in the world who helped make the closing night of the Arnold Klein Gallery one I will always remember fondly:

 
 

Driving away the day after Valentine’s Day knowing I’d never step foot in the gallery again was surreal.  There is still a lot of hard work for my mom and my brother to do getting it closed down and cleared out, but for me it’s over.  The next time I go to Michigan the gallery won’t be there to visit.  From the moment I drove away it began an existence of pure memories.  And they are good ones.

  

Goodnight gallery.

While it still exists, let me tell you about the Gallery (Babble)

This is not quite a eulogy, because that would be premature, but it’s hard to know the days are numbered for something you love and not be in mourning.

My parents have run their own art gallery in Michigan for nearly my entire life.  It began in Detroit as a joint venture with friends called ‘The Klein Vogel Gallery,’ and moved farther north to Royal Oak to eventually become ‘The Arnold Klein Gallery.’  My father is an expert in fine prints and books, and my mother is a talented artist who has provided for her family primarily through her work doing custom framing.  Running their own business has meant that they didn’t have a clear plan for being able to retire, but my dad is in his eighties and the economy in the Detroit area has become depressingly bad, so my parents announced recently that as of Valentine’s Day, 40 years to the day that it opened, the gallery will close its doors.


I can’t quite imagine life without the gallery.   It’s been an extension of my childhood home as long as I can remember.  On more than one occasion when there was a power outage in our neighborhood and we’d drive the 15 minutes north to the gallery to make dinner on the hot plate or simply hang out where the heat was working.  Works of art would move back and forth between the two locations.  We grew up looking at exceptionally beautiful things on our walls, the only downside to that being that every once in a while I would ask something like, “What happened to that print of the zoo I had in my room?” and hear, “Oh, it sold.”

In my home growing up, rearranging pictures was common and regarded as pretty simple.  The first time I saw someone else hang pictures I was surprised at what a production it was.  There was measuring and tape and pencils and pondering and it took my aunt and uncle all evening to hang three things.  They could see I was confused and they just said, “Well, we’re not your parents, we don’t do this all the time so we have to be careful.”  My best friend is married to an engineer and when I volunteered to help them hang a print I’d given them as a wedding gift, he couldn’t believe I’d hung it before he had a chance to get his ruler and his level.  I simply hung it where it looked good, because that’s all there is to it.  If you’re off, pull out the nail and move it over.  My friend’s husband just kept asking, “But how do you know it’s really centered?”  And I explained that if it looked right it was right.  It could measure out perfectly and look wrong sometimes.  It’s not science, it’s art.  It’s one of my odd little life skills that I learned at the gallery.

(Baby Quinn crawling around the gallery in 2007)

The Arnold Klein Gallery is located on Woodward Avenue.  Woodward is the Detroit area’s main drag.  (The first mile of paved road was on Woodward around 6 Mile by the original Ford factory.)  It runs at a weird slant through the city and suburbs and for years people suffered with an uncoordinated address numbering system that meant every new place Woodward ran through the numbers changed, so you could be driving along looking for something and the numbers would go from the 200’s to the 9000’s and down to the 3000’s in a matter of blocks.  The original address was N 4520, but at some point someone declared that all the numbers on all of Woodward needed to go in an order people could understand, and the address changed to 32782 (and the N vs S distinction was removed in the new scheme).  I had to look up that second number because I’ve never gotten used to it.  (In my head the address is always 0254 N in a mirror image because I spent most of my time looking at it from the indoor side of the glass.)

Detroit is designed with driving in mind, so Woodward is not an easy place to walk.  When I was in college I would ‘gallery sit’ for my parents on occasion so they could travel together somewhere, and I remember sending a friend who came to hang out with me on one of those days down the street to get lunch.  It took her forever because she couldn’t tell where she was from the sidewalk.  She had to keep walking out near where the cars were zooming by to see any of the signs, because that was where they were intended to be viewed from.  Woodward was not an easy location to run an art gallery, among the dry cleaners and audio stores and ever changing restaurants.  But it was a street anyone could find, and my parents made it work for decades.

   
(Happy Mona in the gallery)
The gallery was generally quiet.  Because of its location foot traffic was not really a possibility, so customers had to know where to find it.  My parents established a loyal clientele, but an average day at the gallery was usually empty with my mom working furiously in the back.  When I opened my own business I envisioned having uninterrupted time to build instruments or write a novel, but my husband pointed out that that idea was based on what happened in the front half of my parents’ gallery, not my mom’s half.  It’s very unusual for me to have a day at the violin store where no one comes in, but at the gallery it was normal, and kind of nice from a kid’s point of view (as opposed to a grown up with bills to pay point of view).  I used to occasionally go with my dad on some Saturdays to keep him company.  I would wear a nice dress, and we’d have soup and crackers for lunch.  (For some reason we always had different soup at the gallery than we had at home, and oyster crackers and Lorna Doones never made it to our house either that I can recall.)  There was a hobby shop a couple of blocks down called Tiny Tim’s that my dad used to let me walk down to after lunch.  He’d pay me $5 for working at the gallery and I would buy model tanks to put together the rest of the time I was there.  Other regular activities my brothers and I did when we ‘worked’ at the gallery were arrange the mat and frame samples, organize dad’s desk drawers, stack the acrylic blocks my mom used to lay prints flat, draw with brown and black felt tip pens, and make small sculptures out of kneaded erasers.  One of our favorite games if we were all there together was to flip through the display bins of prints and try to come up with an adjective to describe the next piece of art before we saw it.  (“Blue.  Yay!  That one’s mostly blue!  Happy.  No that one looks pretty sad.  Messy.  No, those flowers are pretty neat.  Exciting.  Hey, I think those scribbles are kind of exciting!”  Etc.)  There was crazy brown shag carpeting to roll around on, warm juice to drink (until my parents added a mini fridge to the bathroom, so cold drinks are still kind of a thrill to me when I’m there even though that’s ancient news), classical music on the radio, and time to think.

When I was in sixth grade my class went to the gallery for a field trip to see a one man show by Dick Cruger whose work is playful, dramatic, and fun.  I was so proud to have my class in what felt like my home, and that there were so many cool things to show them.  Dick Cruger himself was there to give a tour of the show, and he’d made a box of simple foam-rubber alligators to pass out to all the kids to keep.  (I kept mine for years until the green faded to yellow and it became too worn to be recognizable.)
There have been so many marvelous shows at the gallery over the years that it makes my head spin a bit to think about them all.  My parents were able to showcase the artists they knew and admired, and often they were people my brothers and I just knew as family friends.  William H. Peck is an Egyptologist my parents knew from their days at the Detroit Institute of Arts, but he also did wonderful origami and they gave him a whole show of his charming work.  We knew Donella Vogel and Larry Blovits who have done our portraits.  I met Arthur Secuda one time in the gallery when he was showing my dad some new pastels he’d done, and I got to title one.   There are so many wonderful artists to have made appearances at the gallery, like Lynn Shaler, Bob Mirek, Carole Harris (she made us a pillow for a wedding gift that I keep in our living room), Megan Parry….  I’m leaving out dozens more I can name off the top of my head, but it’s too much for this post.
There were some great theme shows at the gallery, too, where they would have just trees, or each artist would get a number or a letter of the alphabet.  One of my favorites was a show of prints of birds and fish.  My dad came up with a list of possible titles for the show, and he and my mom decided they liked the list as a whole better than any individual line, so the announcement card for the show was:

Many Birds, Few Fish
Many Birds and a Few Fish
Forty Birds and a Few Fish
Forty-four Birds and a Few Fish
Fifty Birds, Fewer Fish
Fifty Feathered Friends and a Few Fish

(Anytime I have ‘many’ of anything I tack on in my head, “And a few fish.”  I have many violins, and a few fish.)

I’m pretty sure my dad still hand addresses and stamps all of the announcement cards for a show.  That was quite a production when we were kids, doing an assembly line of sorts at the dining room table, where we’d fold letters or stuff envelopes or put on stamps (before self-adhesives, so we used a damp sponge in a little dish to wet each one).  My dad was very particular that everything was straight and neat, and to this day it bugs me if I accidentally put a stamp on crooked.

(Quinn helping my dad at the gallery)

Forty years is a long time for a gallery to survive.  My parents used to apologize to us as kids when we couldn’t afford to do something (not that we ever lacked for anything that mattered) saying, “We’re sorry, you’re supposed to be rich and then open up an art gallery, because it doesn’t work the other way around.”  Everything in Detroit hinges on the health of the auto industry, and that they managed to keep their business running all this time despite the ups and downs of GM, Ford and Chrysler is amazing.  They may not have gotten rich, but they have been an overwhelming success.  They have much to be proud of.

I’m going to miss the gallery.  I know my parents are excited to be moving on to new projects and will enjoy the freedom that comes with not being tied down to a business, so I’m happy for them.  But it’s a real loss to the community that the Arnold Klein Gallery won’t be around anymore.  If you happen to find yourself in Royal Oak, Michigan before Valentine’s Day, go check it out.  It’s one of my favorite places to be.