Description

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts are pleased to co-present At Home with Mike Kelley, a series of online screenings and conversations about the artist's moving-image work. From this Thursday, September 10th through Wednesday September 23rd, we will present Mike Kelley's three videos documenting the journey of his Mobile Homestead public artwork from the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) to his childhood neighborhood and back again.

On Sunday, September 13th at 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT, we are pleased to host an online panel discussion featuring curator Carla Acevedo-Yates, architectural historian Lee Azus, artists Matthew Angelo Harrison and Cary Loren, and director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Laura Sillars, who worked as a producer on the Mobile Homestead videos. The event will be accessible on eai.org. No RSVP or pre-registration is required.

Mobile Homestead is a public artwork by Mike Kelley consisting of a full-scale replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland, built upon a complex of secret subterranean tunnels and rooms. Located on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) in Downtown Detroit, the sculpture functions as a community gallery with a removable, street legal façade that is mobilized periodically to provide various public services in and around the city. 

Three Mobile Homestead videos document the maiden voyage of the mobile façade’s journey from MOCAD to Kelley’s childhood neighborhood and back again in 2010.  What emerges is a poignant portrait of the post-recession Motor City, speaking to the city’s cultural diversity, history, and socioeconomic stratification, and detailing local establishments that run the gamut from a motor-themed strip club to the Henry Ford Museum.

Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead is commissioned by Artangel in association with MOCAD, LUMA Foundation and Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts with the generous support of the Artangel International Circle.

View the Mobile Homestead videos here.

View the Mobile Homestead panel here:



Carla Acevedo-Yates was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has worked as a curator, researcher, and art critic across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Previously, she was the associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University where she organized solo exhibitions of new work by Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Peña Salinas, Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, Duane Linklater, and Scott Hocking.

Lee Azus is an architectural historian with an interest in twentieth-century American housing policy and its relation to racialized capitalism. His essay, "Uncanny Home: Considering Race and American Housing Policy in Mike Kelley's 'Mobile Homestead'" considers white flight and the suburbanization of Detroit, published in From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Perspectives on the Interaction of Communities, Residents and Activists with the Politics of the Home (UCL Press, 2017). He has presented work at the Amps (Architecture_Media_Politics_Society) Mediated City Conference, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, the Ecojustice and Activism Conference, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. He holds an MS in architecture from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as an MS in historic preservation from Eastern Michigan University.

Matthew Angelo Harrison (born 1989, Detroit, MI) creates otherworldly sculptures that are in conversation with anthropology, science fiction and industrial design. Harrison completed his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), Atlanta Contemporary (2017), and the Broad Museum at Michigan State University (2018). His work was recently included in Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Museum in Michigan, The 2019 Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Colored People Time: Quotidian Pasts at Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, Harrison will enjoy solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and then at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. He is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. Harrison lives and works in Detroit.

Cary Loren is a filmmaker, musician, photographer and founding member of the Destroy All Monsters collective. He lives in Detroit and is the proprietor of The Book Beat, a visual arts bookstore.

Laura Sillars is Director of MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) and Dean of the MIMA School of Art and Design, part of Teesside University. She previously served as Artistic Director, Site Gallery, Sheffield and Programmes Director, FACT: Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, and Curator: Public Programmes at Tate Liverpool. Working with the artist Mike Kelley, with Artangel and MOCAD, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Sillars produced the 2012 Mobile Homestead films.