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For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, a conceptual art and anthropology video project---included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017---in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, 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. Her 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 alone.
List of contents
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword / Christopher Y. Lew xiii
Prologue 1
Introduction 25
1. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2014) 47
2. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2014) 58
3. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2014) 70
4. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2015) 76
5. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2015) 87
6. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2015) 99
7. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2016) 107
8. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2016) 120
9. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 5 (2016) 133
10. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 6 (2016) 156
11. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 7 (2016) 165
12. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2017) 178
13. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2017) 187
14. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2017) 202
15. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2017) 211
16. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 5 (2017) 217
17. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 6 (2017) 224
18. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 7 (2017) 233
19. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2018) 247
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
Bibliography 287
Index 299
About the author
Maya Stovall
Summary
Maya Stovall uses her Liquor Store Theatre conceptual art project—in which she danced near her Detroit neighborhood's liquor stores as a way to start conversations with her neighbors—as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation.
