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An E-magazine: Passionate for the arts, architecture & design

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  Akron • Akron Art Museum
 
  Canton • Canton Museum of Art
 
  Cincinnati • Cincinnati Art Museum
    • Contemporary Arts Center
    • DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati
    • Taft Museum
 
  Cleveland • Cleveland Museum of Art
    • Cleveland Institute of Art/Reinberger Galleries
    • Cleveland State University Art Gallery
  • Museum of Contemporary Art
 
  Columbus • Columbus Museum of Art
  • Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University
 
  Dayton • Dayton Art Institute
 
  Hamilton • Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum
 
  Kent • Kent State University Museum of Costume and Decorative Arts
 
  Oberlin • Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College
 
  Oxford • Miami University Art Museum
 
  Rio Grande • University of Rio Grande Sculpture Park
 
  Springfield • Springfield Museum of Art
 
  Toledo • Toledo Museum of Art
 
  Youngstown • Butler Institute of American Art

 

Akron Art Museum

Detroit Disassembled:

Photographs by Andrew Moore

June 5, 2010 – October 10, 2010 

 

Andrew Moore’s photographs of the Motor City are sublime—beautiful, operatic in scale and drama, tragic yet offering a glimmer of hope. They are the subject of Detroit Disassembled, an exhibition organized by the Akron Art Museum making its debut here before touring nationally. Detroit, once the epitome of our nation’s industrial wealth and might, has been in decline for almost a half-century. The city is now one-third empty land—more abandoned property than any American city except post-Katrina New Orleans. 

Moore’s images, printed on the scale of epic history paintings, belong to an artistic tradition that began in the 17th century. Numerous artists have used ruins to remind their viewers of the fall of past great civilizations and to warn that contemporary empires risk the same fate. Moore’s soaring scenes of rusting factory halls and crumbling theaters share the monumentality of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th century engravings of the fallen civic monuments of ancient Rome and Greece. His photographs of skeletal houses and collapsed churches carry forward the Romantic tone and rich hues of Caspar David Friedrich’s 19th century paintings of fallen medieval cathedrals and castles. Although hard to believe that Moore’s post-apocalyptic scenes reflect present-day America, he has been scrupulously honest, creating photographs that are both documentary and metaphorical in nature. 

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