Art Mile will present three films from Maya Stovall’s staged Liquor Store Theatre, a conceptual art and anthropology video project in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. In conversations with her neighbors—which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit's history—bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve on its own. The series is the subject of a new book published by Duke University Press with a forward by Christopher Y. Lew, which is slated to be released in November 2020.

Friday, July 31, 2020 @ 2:00–2:30pm ET:
Liquor Store Theatre, vol. 5 no. 1, 2019
Single channel video. 10:10

Saturday, August 1, 2020 @ 2:00–2:30pm ET:
Liquor Store Theatre, vol. 5 no. 2, 2019
Single channel video. 9:00

Sunday, August 2, 2020 @ 2:00–2:30pm ET:
Liquor Store Theatre, vol. 6 no. 1, 2019 
Single channel video. 9:47