ROBERT SESTOK

Born in Detroit and raised in Birmingham, Michigan, Robert Sestok began welding at fourteen and studied at the College for Creative Studies. He took his first Detroit studio in 1967 in the Old Convention Hall near Wayne State University, sharing space with Gordon Newton in a building that also housed John Egner, Michael Luchs, Brenda Goodman, and Jim Chatelain.

 

That cohort became known as the Cass Corridor movement. Working in a depressed neighborhood south of Wayne State, its artists drew on industrial detritus, auto parts, and salvaged timber to produce work of deliberate rawness. The group's principal exhibition space, the Willis Gallery, opened in 1971 and attracted the attention of Sam Wagstaff, then curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and subsequently of critics and collectors on both coasts.

 

After a brief period outside the city during the 1970s, Sestok returned by 1980, the year he began working in welded steel. He has continued in the medium without interruption since, working largely in scrap, salvage, and recycled material drawn from the yards, foundries, and streets of Detroit.