ABOUT
Art Grown from Detroit's Soil
City Sculpture is a living, open-air sculpture park in Detroit — a place where welded steel rises from once-vacant ground, where decades of creative work have been planted like seeds for the public to discover and return to.
Founded by longtime Detroit artist Robert Sestok, City Sculpture is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to giving transformative art a permanent home in the community that inspired it.
What We're Here To Do
City Sculpture exists to make art accessible. Our mission is to provide a free, public educational experience — for students, neighbors, and visitors of all ages — through the found-object and welded-metal sculpture of Robert Sestok.
We believe art belongs outside gallery walls. We believe an empty lot can become a destination. We believe that when a city invests in its artists, everyone benefits.
City Sculpture is free to visit and open to the public. No ticket required.
The Sculpture Park
Tucked into a Detroit neighborhood on Farnsworth Street, the City Sculpture park features approximately 30 large-scale welded steel sculptures — abstract, figurative, and hybrid works created by Robert Sestok over more than four decades of practice. Many pieces weigh thousands of pounds and stand well over ten feet tall. Others have the ornamental delicacy of ironwork or the lyrical rhythm of improvised jazz.
The works are constructed largely from recycled and found materials: old propane tanks, salvaged re-rod, industrial steel. Sestok describes his process as deconstruction and reconstruction — tearing things apart, reimagining them, building something new from what the city left behind.
The park originally opened in 2015 at 955 W. Alexandrine Street in Midtown, where it transformed four abandoned lots into a landmark of Detroit's art landscape. In 2020, City Sculpture relocated to its current home at 3573 Farnsworth Street — carrying the same spirit, the same sculptures, and the same open invitation to the public.
"City Sculpture is phenomenal. It's fantastic and long overdue — both to have all of Bob's art in one place, as well as creating this new gathering space."
— Michelle Perron, Director, Center Galleries at the College for Creative Studies
How City Sculpture Came to Be
The idea took root in 2011. Robert Sestok had spent decades creating large-scale welded steel sculptures, and by then had assembled a body of work that had no permanent home. The sculptures lived in his studio, in storage, in temporary exhibitions — but they deserved to be seen.
Sestok approached the City of Detroit and proposed converting vacant land into a public sculpture park. He negotiated, raised money through donations and a grant from Midtown Detroit Inc., and ultimately purchased the lots himself — one block from his own house and studio. He leveled the ground, poured concrete foundations, installed 800 feet of continuous fencing, and erected 30 sculptures.
City Sculpture officially opened on July 10, 2015, to a crowd of hundreds. It was an immediate landmark — a patch of former blight transformed into an outdoor museum that was free, accessible, and unmistakably Detroit.
In 2020, the park relocated to its current home at 3573 Farnsworth Street. The sculptures moved with it. The mission did not change.
Today, City Sculpture continues to operate as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with a rotating exhibition schedule and visiting artist program dedicated to exposing the public to experimental sculpture in one of America's most creatively vital cities.
About Robert Sestok
Robert Sestok has lived and worked in Detroit since 1967. He grew up in Birmingham, Michigan, and came of age artistically in the Cass Corridor — the gritty stretch near Wayne State University that became the birthplace of what many consider the only major contemporary art movement to emerge from the city.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Sestok joined a community of painters, sculptors, and printmakers who used found objects, industrial materials, and the raw energy of their surroundings to produce work that drew national attention. Critics, collectors, and coastal art institutions all took note — and Sestok stayed.
He began welding steel at age 14, and has never stopped. Since 1980, he has created a body of sculptural work that is abstract, figurative, ornamental, and monumental — often all at once. His work reflects his belief in diversity of expression: no single style, no fixed manifesto, just the relentless pursuit of an idea.
Beyond sculpture, Sestok is a painter, printmaker, and muralist. His murals grace the walls of Third Man Records' Detroit studio. His paintings hang in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, and Wayne State University. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MOCAD, College for Creative Studies, and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.
He is the recipient of a 2017 Kresge Fellowship in the Visual Arts, grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2020 AXD Kresge Creative Many Grant. He is the subject of the monograph Selected Art Works: 2004–2014, which he self-published in 2015 — a true Detroit DIY move.
As art critic Dennis A. Nawrocki has written, Sestok is "the prime protagonist of the indefatigable do-it-yourself Detroit work ethic." City Sculpture is the fullest expression of that ethic: one artist, five decades of work, a city of vacant lots — and the belief that something beautiful could grow here.