Arts

The ONE Mile project launches a design and culture magazine in Detroit’s North End

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  This month the ONE Mile project launched its much-anticipated magazine, an image-rich publication featuring the best in art, design, music and culture from Detroit’s epic North End neighborhood. The event took place in an unmarked garage on Oakland Avenue, where local residents, bikers, fashionistas, and culture connoisseurs got together over music, a photography exhibit, and snacks. Presiding over the event – ONE Mile’s Mothership – a gilded, P-Funk-inspired mobile DJ booth and broadcast module. Detroit Hip-Hop legend DJ LOS spun from inside the Mothership, linking the neighborhood’s funk music legacy to contemporary hip-hop grooves in real time. The ONE Mile inaugural issue includes interviews, essays, and photography focusing on the neighborhood’s inspiring residents and cultural innovators. Community advocate Jerry Hebron shares her impressions of growing up in the North End, and her ambitious plan to cultivate fruits, vegetable, and arts programming at the Oakland Community Gardens. The infamous biker-baker Dee Castellow talks about running Ava’s World Famous Sweet Potato Cakes and the pleasures of experiencing Detroit on his customized three-wheeler. And Dave Boggon, owner of the Red Jazz Shoe Shine, reveals what it’s like saving soles and spinning music at his legendary shop. Additionally, the magazine incorporates stories about the ONE Mile project’s recent public events and experimental happenings. The renowned fashion photographer Piper Carter covers the opening of the Bureau of Emergent Urbanity, an occasion that marked the transformation of a vacant barbershop into a neighborhood cultural venue. The images are beautifully informal and evocative, capturing the intended convivial and social sensibility of the space. ONE Mile’s Legacy of Funk Performance as retold by the infamous culture and music producer, Bryce Detroit, makes the feature story. The piece describes how last October twelve former and current members of the mythical group Parliament Funkadelic came together for an unprecedented performance in an unmarked garage on Oakland Avenue. The event, free and open to the public, drew over 700 residents and music aficionados. Coupled with the launch of the Mothership capsule, the performance highlighted the potential for a sustainable cultural continuum, which without nostalgia or lament connected the North End’s historic musical heritage to a broader contemporary audience. The ONE Mile magazine comes at a critical time for the North End, when aggressive blight removal threatens to erase the neighborhood’s connection to the history of music in the United States. About ONE Mile The ONE Mile Project is a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort to support the cultural production and socio-economic activity of Detroit’s epic North End neighborhood. We host events, exhibits, workshops, and performances. We create public spaces and experimental environments. We design tools for broadcast and dissemination. And we continue to build a network of people interested in the sustained collective vibrancy of the North End. For more information visit onemile.us or follow us on Facebook.