Invisible Intentions and the Built Environment of a Detroit Backlot: Archaeological and Creative Interventions at the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead Site (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit)

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This presentation reflects upon the scope and outcomes of a collaborative archaeological and creative project at the site of the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead in the backlot of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). In 2021 and 2022 research involving archaeologists based in Detroit and Chicago, artist Jan Tichy, and the MoCAD’s Teen Council explored the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead and remnants of the adjacent below-ground built environment, which include a 19th-century women’s prison, homeless shelter, outbuildings of a Gilded Age mansion, and automotive service buildings. Their excavations, exhibits, and creative work consider the Homestead’s built environment in relation to concepts of presence and absence, the seen and unseen, and how the architectural vestiges of trauma and inequality survive within the site’s historical and contemporary landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Archaeology/Architecture

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow