The art in the Detroit People Mover stations is a world-class collection with a uniquely Detroit sensibility. When the People Mover, Detroit's elevated transit system, was being planned, the stations were designed simply to serve as basic points of entry and departure, but in 1984 Irene Walt and the Downtown Detroit People Mover Art Commission, a volunteer committee also known as Art in the Stations, undertook the task of incorporating major works by contemporary American artists into the thirteen People Mover stations. art in the country. With rush photographs by Balthazar Korab and accompanying narrative, Art in the Stations examines each of the gorgeous works that grace the People Mover stations. The works of ten Michigan artists reference Detroit whenever possible: the mosaic in the Cobo Hall station depicts seven full-scale automobiles; at the Grand Circus Park stop, a bronze life-sized figure reads the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News; the Financial District station is titled 'D' is for Detroit; and the art in four stations was constructed entirely of Detroit's world-renowned Pewabic pottery tile. the Stations documents, Detroit's rich culture and testifies to the perseverance and hard work that made the display of this art possible.

Profiles in Diversity explores the momentous transformation in Europe from 1750-1870 by looking at the lives of European Jews who experienced it.

Equal parts urban culture and poetic travelogue, Looping Detroit is a collection of observations each taking place in and around one station stop of Detroit's People Mover. Built in 1987, the People Mover was and is largely regarded as a public transit boondoggle--costly, circumscribed, and, in light of these, a particularly egregious investment within a city lacking sufficient public transportation. At a time when Detroit's downtown development is booming, with tremendous investment in a downtown that was ignored for decades, the very real possibility exists that this new interest will parallel the same investment patterns that brought the over invested People Mover to a fragment of the city. Looping Detroit invites artists and writers to ride the small loop as an explorer, mining the environs around each station as a poetic ramble, a psycho geographic wander, a cultural inquiry that simultaneously ponders the poetics of circulating above the city streets while probing the greater narrative of Detroit's public transit conundrum. Contributors include award-winning Detroit novelists Lolita Hernandez and Michael Zardoorian, poets Gloria House and Walter Lacy, music producer Cornelius Harris, Chace MicWrite Morris, frontman of the Detroit hip-hop trio Coldmen Young, and radio producer Zak Rosen.

At the height of America's Arts and Crafts movement, Detroit neighbors Horace J. Caulkins and Mary Chase Perry pooled their talents together to found Pewabic Pottery. With modest beginnings in 1903, Pewabic transformed from a rented stable in Brush Park to an English Tudor building on East Jefferson Avenue, where it has operated since 1907. Today, the iconic enterprise continues Perry's dedication to handcrafted ceramics and remains known for its iridescent glaze on everything from vessels and architectural tiles to ecclesiastical installations in churches across the country, including the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Author Cara Catallo illuminates the story behind one of the oldest American handcrafted pottery traditions.

Public art - the making, management and mediation of art outside its conventional location in museums and galleries, and the livable city - a concept involving user-centred strategies for urban planning and design, are both socially produced but have emerged from different fields and tend to be discussed in isolation. This book applies a range of critical perspectives which have emerged from different disciplines - art criticism, urban design, urban sociology, geography and critical theory - to examine the practice of art for urban public spaces, seeing public art from positions outside those of the art world to ask how it might contribute to possible urban futures. Exploring the diversity of urban politics, the functions of public space and its relation to the structures of power, the roles of professionals and users in the construction of the city, the gendering of space and the ways in which space and citizen are represented, the book explains how these issues are as relevant to architecture, urban design and urban planning as they are to public art. Drawing on a wealth of images from across the UK and Europe and the USA, in particular, the author questions the effectiveness of public art in achieving more convivial urban environments, whilst retaining the idea that imagining possible futures is as much part of a democratic society as using public space.