ABOUT
City Sculpture Detroit is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in the belief that art transforms materials, spaces, and people. Through found-object and welded metal sculptures, we create hands-on educational experiences that inspire the next generation of creators.
Program
City Sculpture serves high school and college students principally, providing direct access to large-scale welded steel in an outdoor setting and without admission. Programming addresses fabrication method, material sourcing, and the history of the Cass Corridor movement, whose artists established industrial salvage as a Detroit vocabulary and among whom the organization's founder came of age.
The Installation
Sixteen sculptures produced between 1988 and 2013 are sited across the grounds of River Trail. The works are fabricated from salvaged industrial material, structural steel, reinforcing rod, and 500-gallon propane tanks cut apart and reassembled. Much of it drawn from scrapyards, foundries, and streets across southeast Michigan. Individual works range from just under six feet to fourteen, and from approximately 250 to 4,000 pounds.
Sestok characterizes his method as deconstruction and reconstruction, a process in which the origin of the material remains legible in the finished work. That legibility is central to the educational program: a student can read the propane tank in the sculpture and reason backward through the decisions that produced it. Sestok allows portions of the steel to oxidize rather than sealing it, so the work continues to change with the seasons.
History
City Sculpture originated in 2011, when Sestok, holding some three decades of unsited sculpture behind his Cass Corridor studio, identified four vacant municipal lots at 955 W. Alexandrine along the John C. Lodge service drive, one block from his house. He proposed a 200-by-200-foot sculpture park to the City of Detroit; following two years of zoning review and City Council scheduling, he acquired the parcels in March 2013 for $18,000, supported by a grant from Midtown Detroit Inc. and individual donations raised through the nonprofit.
Sestok then leveled the ground, poured concrete foundations, installed 800 feet of continuous fencing and a commercial rolling gate, and sited each work individually across the 17,000-square-foot parcel. The park opened on July 10, 2015, to an audience of several hundred, and operated in the Cass Corridor for five years.
The Alexandrine installation was dismantled in 2020 and the collection placed in storage. In 2026, in partnership with Library Street Collective, City Sculpture was reinstalled on the grounds of River Trail in Little Village, where sixteen works are now permanently sited and open to the public daily. City Sculpture remains an independent 501(c)(3) and continues to operate its educational programming under its own direction.