Click HERE to tour the Exhibition
Concept
DETROIT360
encompasses the full circle of Lowell’s work from the
tangible of painting to the intangible of web art, forming an
orbit around Detroit and the questions it begs about urban society
in a decentralizing world.
Artwork
The subject of Lowell’s paintings is the urban landscape as
inspired and informed by Detroit. When the World Wide Web emerged
in 1993 he embraced it as an art form by creating websites as
virtual paintings.
The most extensive of those, DetroitYES.com,
is a natural progression from his paintings. Now a 1000+ page
for-art website built around its core, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit,
portrays the painful transformation of Detroit from industrial
to information age city. DetroitYES is an attempt use the web
to paint a multidimensional portrait of the International Metropolis
of Detroit through images of the city and the voices of those
who care about it as expressed through the website's forums.
The idea has been to create an audience authored artwork, one
where the artist poses the question and then becomes just one
of the participants in pursuit of answers, answers which enrich
the portrait with color and detail.
From there if attempts to move from
virtual community to a real community that steps
in into the real world via IRL [in real life] events such as the
February 2001
"Fabulous Ruins Night" event,
FSC [Forum Social Club] pub
gatherings, the May 2003
SoulfulDetroit Night event, and the
upcoming Web Art IRL event.
Lauded as the best Detroit website by the Detroit Free Press,
Detroit News, Detroit Metro Times, Hour Magazine, and as a Yahoo
Pick of the Year, DetroitYES has been profiled worldwide in many
media sources including the New York Times, Public Television and
Wired Magazine. Combined with
SoulfulDETROIT
and the
Lost Synagogues of Detroit Lowell's for-art websites currently
attract over 2 million visitors a year and process thousands of
visitor interactions daily through its vigorous and sometimes
heated discussion forums.
Lowell
Lowell Boileau is a self learned fine art
painter and web artist who has presented his paintings in
exhibitions in Detroit, Chicago and Germany since 1980. Starting
in the early 1990’s his medium of expression expanded into the
cyber world with his digital crossover piece
“Total
Intervention” [presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts in
1995 as part of the Interventions Exhibition] and into the World
Wide Web with his creation of the purely for-art websites
DetroitYES.com and SoulfulDetroit.com. His work has been
recognized through three Michigan Creative Artist grants and a
National Endowment for the Arts grant.
View Resume, Reviews, Media Profiles
Cass Café
The Cass Café is well known as the gathering point for Detroit’s
creative community and has been host to exhibitions and
performance by many of Detroit’s most renowned artists and
musicians. It is located in the heart of Detroit’s cultural center
and art bohemia, just south of the corner of Cass and Forest and a
short distance south of the Detroit Art Institute and Wayne State
University campus.
Links
Detroit360
Exhibition Website
Lowell Boileau
Profile &Reviews
Lowell Boileau
Online Gallery
Cass Café
Description & Map
For-Art Websites
DetroitYES
SoulfulDetroit
Lost Synagogues of Detroit