‘Mobile Homestead’ parked in front of the original Mike Kelley home on Palmer Road, Westland, Michigan, 2010. | Photo: Corine Vermuelen, courtesy of MOCAD.
On Tuesday (Sept. 17), Santa Monica Museum of Art presents The Mobile Homestead Project: A Conversation with Mary Clare Stevens, Jim Shaw and Cary Loren, a discussion of the public sculpture Mobile Homestead, created by the late artist, CalArts alumnus and former faculty member Mike Kelley (Art MFA 78)
Mobile Homestead is a permanent sculpture that replicates the artist’s childhood home in Michigan and is housed behind Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Its ground floor serves as a community space for Detroit, hosting various projects and events.
Kelley wrote of Mobile Homestead:
This project blatantly makes a distinction between public art and private art, between the notions that art functions for the social good, and that art addresses personal desires and pleasure. Mobile Homestead does both; it is simultaneously geared toward community service and anti-social private sub-cultural activities. It has a public side, and a secret side.
Artists Shaw (Art MFA 78) and Loren co-founded the “anti-rock” band Destroy All Monsters with Kelley while they were undergraduates together at University of Michigan. The improvisational band later grew into an art collective.
The event is part of SMMoA’s A Collection of Ideas…, a series that “presents conversations with some of today’s most innovative and creative minds to examine the important socio-cultural and political issues of our time.” Shaw and Loren will talk about their roles in Mobile Homestead, and Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Executive Director Mary Clare Stevens joins them in discussing the sculpture’s function as public art, community space and private architecture.