I really wanted to like this book. Alas, it's a good idea poorly executed. Beginning with its misleading title (quite a bit of the artwork is found outside the confines of Detroit City Limits), Art in Detroit Public Places is a narrow paperback stuffed with photographs and descriptions of public works of art in the Metro area. Each mosaic, statue, or sculpture is given a lone, poorly reproduced black and white picture apparently taken from the same angle by David Clements. How can a picture snapped from across the street capture the impact of something like The Heidelberg Project? A solitary monochromatic image eschews the splendor of the enormous collection of junk with its telephone poles decorated with doll heads and artist Tyree Guyton's ever-present motif of playful polka dots. I've seen inept tourists take better pictures.
Alongside these pictures, Dennis Alan Nawrocki pens sketchy descriptions of the works, their creators, and their current status. It's rather ironic that this is the second edition of the work as the writing is aggravatingly set in the present. One would hope that the language would be given a more indefinite time frame. Instead of saying "recently" or "currently," it'd be smarter to have dates cited.
Even the maps that precede each of the five sections of the book are problematic. These graphics are slightly better than if a dot-matrix printer had produced them. In addition, very little effort would need to be expended to list the location of the artwork in succeeding pages on these maps. While this might seem a trifling issue, it exemplifies how Art in Detroit Public Places is an overly ambitious, under-produced mess. (ISBN: 0814327028)
