We have all, at one time or another, made a journey to see a work of art. I have traveled to Illinois to visit the Art Institute, many of my class mates drove to Ghent to see the Ghent Altarpiece, and thousands of tourists from all over the world (including those on this program) have traveled to Venice, Kassel, and Münster for the Biennale, documenta, and Skulptur Projekte.

This type of tourism is not a recent occurrence, either. Documenta is 70 years old, and the Venice Biennale, the oldest of its type, is 114 years old. Around this time, photographic reproductions of artworks began appearing in books. Before this, the only way one could experience a work of art (that hasn’t been reproduced through some type of engraving) would be through travel. In the early modern period Europeans would travel to sit in foreign courts in the Mughal Empire and China, spending a large amount of their time engaging with local artistic traditions. Even in the Middle Ages, Christians and Muslims alike would make pilgrimages to cathedrals and Mecca to encounter relics and participate in the Hajj.

These examples of travel are all necessitated by location. Art professionals need to be in Venice to network, experience installations, and engage with the art world, for example. A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of la Grande Jatte is in Chicago, so, if you want to see it, you have to travel to Chicago. Physical space, however, is not the only form of distance that necessitates travel, especially art travel. There are works that are geographically close but culturally distant.

An example: I live in the greater Detroit metro area, so downtown is only a 30 minute drive away from my house. Detroit suffers from a serious inconsistency in development. There are some gentrified areas in which millions of dollar have been invested. The area around the major sports stadiums in particular is booming, and they are even building a new hockey arena. Many other residential areas, however, still suffer from urban decay, violence, and the effects of food deserts, mostly because these are prime areas of investment. This leaves many longterm Detroit citizens out of the comeback. This diversity of economic development means that, culturally, Detroit is densely packed. Tourist centers, thriving residential ares, abandoned residential areas, and gentrified neighborhoods all sit shoulder to shoulder.

In 1986 in the historically black McDougall-Hunt neighborhood in Detroit, Tyree Guyton began an artistic protest against decades of governmental neglect. His childhood street, Heidelburg, had been suffering from urban blight and poverty for decades, so he began decorating the houses with help from local children with the hopes of starting an artist colony, outdoor art space, and transforming the neighborhood. The result was a sprawling outdoor installation known as the Heidelberg Project, which sits in the middle of a neighborhood still plagued by the same issues Guyton set out to tackle in 1986.

I barely consider driving to Detroit a trip and have visited the Detroit Institute of Arts dozens of times. It is a traditional, academic, white cube in which I feel very comfortable. The Heidelberg Project is not a white cube. It is, as mentioned, situated in a still developing neighborhood and firmly in conversation with the epidemic of urban blight in Detroit. It is a place were the predominantly black population finds community through collective labor and engages with aesthetic and creative ideas. For white hipsters and suburbanites, visiting the Heidelberg Project may be an uncomfortable experience, even though it is in their backyard. Unlike the DIA, which has deep European roots, the Heidelberg Project was not built to accommodate them. They are not part of the collective labor or the political struggle of this site-specific installation, meaning that their presence is a form of cultural (rather than geographic) travel.

Travel, then, must exist on a set of axis, taking into account both geographic and cultural distance. I have flown all the way to Germany to view art, much of which has been created by non-western artists; however, the vast majority of these works have been shown in the European-style galleries and museums in which I grew up and with which I feel so familiar. So, culturally, how far have a I really traveled?

This is, of course, an oversimplification. After all, Germany is very different from the U.S., and I have experienced a variety of cultures between Cologne, Kassel, Münster, and the Turkish population that is so large here. However, the idea that travel can only be measured in miles from home is also reductive. This eliminates our ability to recognize opportunities to engage with the cultures that we live right next to and privileges the costliest forms of art travel.