The Spirit of the City

Marshall Fredericks’s Detroit sculptures capture the spirit of the Motor City and its dramatic transformation from the 1950s to the present day. In this book, Janna Jones analyzes eight of these enormous works of public art, situating them and their structures in metro Detroit’s distinctive midcentury milieu and bringing much-needed critical attention to this sculptor’s oeuvre. Sadly, some of these artworks have suffered along with the city as it shrank from its postwar zenith. Both the buildings and the sculptures erected for them deserve to be rescued from neglect, and then maintained and preserved for the future.