Anne L'Ecuyer

If anything, the Twin Cities are practical. Everywhere I looked, I found examples of sensible people who make things work.  A restaurant stayed open late to feed restaurant workers a meal they’d enjoy.  A bed-and-breakfast created a community by providing international visitors with a few simple rules of engagement. A mind-melding show at the Walker Art Center explained the history of conceptual art in America in perfectly accessible terms.

It’s been a pleasure to remember how good conversations work too, loosening up logic, giving it shape and story. Love, effort, experience, music, heritage—it’s all connected.  Erin McLennon and I had it figured out over two diet cokes and a plate of cajun steak tips with horseradish sauce.

Bronzeville is a southside suburb distanced from Chicago’s marbled institutions by both miles and history, but situated immediately adjacent to the Obama’s family home.  I was invited there by a colleague who is renovating a place for his family.

A few important markers and some grand old houses tell you what Bronzeville once was, but there are still questions about what it is becoming.  I’m not sure I know, either.  I’m beginning to enjoy that feeling.

Detroit has a central core with broad avenues that radiate out. The concentric boundary streets are marked in a way that only a city planner could love. The road eight miles out from the center is called ‘8 Mile Road.’ Five miles later it’s ‘13 Mile Road.’ It goes on like that to the edge of town.

There is a difference between municipal boundaries and cultural geographies, though, especially in Detroit. Teenagers blend the borders of the city with their bikes every day. Muscle cars stream Latin polka through Black neighborhoods and down crumbling freeways. Poverty creates a density in one place and a vacuum in another. The region really is a collection of places mapped out by the cultures that inhabit and transgress its linear design.

Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.