FLINT, MICHIGAN
The most relevant space with which I've interacted is also the most personally accessible: my hometown of Flint, Michigan. I fell in love with Flint before I learned how distressed1 the place was.
By high school, I'd acquainted myself with the city's national reputation as the quintessential ruined company town. On a more personal level, my best friends were becoming inextricably entangled in problems resulting from poverty, abuse, and neglect. These circumstances, far from dispelling Flint's beauty, sharpened and focused it as relief against the surrounding trauma.
The "Flint paradox" is worthy of artistic exploration2. Moreover, such an exploration is essential3. Realizing that this subject will require a liftime to engage, I've shaped my career and vision around the subject of Flint's joy, light, sorrow, and glory4. Flint's redemption.
1
Flint has some of the highest unemployment, poverty, and crime rates in the nation. A continually shrinking tax base has required the scaling back or elimination of many public services, and all levels of local government are rife with corruption and inefficiency. Declining enrollment has required the closing of numerous local schools and deindustrialization and economic disinvestment continues.
2
That is, granted my assertion that paradox is an inherently interesting problem.
Flint's history as a vibrant, energetic community with a valuable economic niche, as compared with its current distress, the human level on which distress is felt, and the difficulty of adaptation on a local level provides a compelling context for the artistic engagement of contradictions.
3
That is, granted my assertion that art is an effectively transforming enterprise.
Flint is symptomatic of problems derived from our political institutions and economic practices. As a case-study of America's worst-case domestic scenario, an artistic exploration of Flint is revealing and useful on philosophical, cultural, and even practical levels.
Additionally, with a metro population of almost 500,000, Flint demands artistic engagement to chronicle, define, and reflect upon its own development.
As such, applications are both broad and local.
4
A field as with the same promise as Hurston's Florida and Hugo's Paris, and Williams' and O'Connor's sprawling South.
