Next month, Traffic Jam and Snug at Canfield and Second will host Scrap, the first community arts festival showcasing Detroit’s metal working community.
The daylong event will bring together four teams of welders to re-purpose industrial scrap into revolving kinetic sculptures. While the Michigan Blacksmith Guild provide on-site demos of their work, Detroit’s Recycle Here will explain how recycling and upcycling can transform cities and build communities.
“This is just a way to highlight a medium that isn’t highlighted very often,” says Danielle Kaltz, an event organizer. “There’s a really impressive underground metal community in Detroit, and there’s a lot of great artists.”
Kaltz says her team has collected and sorted a few tons of welding materials over the past few months to be distributed to each team on the day of the competition.
“We’ve had a volunteer who has helped up separate the welding material so each team will get a fair amount of the same stuff — nobody is getting a better bucket than the next person,” she says, adding that bed frames, car parts, and steel sheets are among the top items donated by Detroiters for the event.
Each resulting sculpture will be auctioned off, with proceeds benefiting the local non-profit Green Living Science, an outgrowth of Detroit’s Recycle Here that builds awareness for the environment through education and service.
For more information about the event, to held Sept. 13 in the parking lot across the street from the restaurant at 511 W. Canfield, click here.
IN OTHER MIDTOWN NEWS, the Motor City Art Center has opened at 4468 Third St. In addition to displaying artwork, the venue will also host live music and entertainment. It also can be rented out for private events. Click here for additional information.
