Kick Out The Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor 1963-1977
Discover the definitive chronicle of Detroit’s legendary counterculture art movement with the official exhibition catalog for Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963-1977. Co-organized by pioneering curators Mary Jane Jacob and Jay Belloli for the blockbuster 1980 exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), this rare, highly sought-after publication serves as the most comprehensive historical record of the raw, intense, and collaborative aesthetic heyday that defined Midtown Detroit.
Documenting a Golden Era of Urban Expressionism
During a period of rapid industrial and economic transformation in Detroit, the affordable, sprawling spaces of the Cass Corridor neighborhood became a magnet for avant-garde creators. Operating on pure intensity, mutual inspiration, and artistic grit, these creators forged a deeply unique localized movement. This landmark volume charts that evolution, spanning the formative “Wagstaff Years” under visionary DIA Curator of Contemporary Art Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. (1968–1971) through the vital alternative hub of the Willis Gallery (1971–1977).
Features & Highlights
- Comprehensive Historical Overview: Features essential scholarly essays detailing how a marginalized community of artists found a voice in close proximity, utilizing raw, industrial materials to create art of uncompromising integrity.
- 22 Defining Artists: Illuminates the work and legacy of the twenty-two pivotal artists chosen to represent the movement, including Urban Expressionists and masters of assemblage like Michael Luchs and Gordon Newton.
- Museum Quality Scholarship: Authored and compiled during Mary Jane Jacob’s influential curatorial tenure at the Detroit Institute of Arts before the exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Whether you are a collector of mid-century American avant-garde history, a scholar of industrial city aesthetics, or a proud lover of Detroit’s resilient cultural heritage, this catalog is an indispensable visual and historical archive of a legendary era that continues to echo today.
Includes a collection of related ephemera: a program and a photocopy of a review of the “Kick Out The Jams” show when it traveled to Chicago; a 1988 Detroit Monthly magazine article on Gordon Newton; a program and Metro Times newspaper clipping of a 2009 Cass Corridor exhibition at Wayne State University’s Elaine L. Jacob gallery. Personalized inscription on front endpaper, dated 1980.
Fine+ in wraps. Unusually bright fine copy, one of the best conditions we’ve seen, pristine in wraps. [I3]
$ 375.00
