The MOCAD main building closed in August for HVAC and infrastructure renovations through early 2026. The Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead, the late artist's full-scale ranch-house replica permanently installed on the lawn, stayed open. Mary-Ann Monforton's solo exhibition Heart Land opened in it Friday and is free to the public.
Hours are Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monforton built site-responsive sculpture for each of the four rooms in the Kelley house. The whole show is built mostly from chicken wire and plaster-dipped gauze. In the foyer, a participatory work titled Everybody is a star (2022) lets visitors handle lumpy Oscar trophies and gold medals in front of a star-spangled backdrop reading VIP.
The dining room is set for the artist's seventieth birthday party: a tiered cake, a crown, place settings in pale pink and shimmering gold, a gold candelabra-style chandelier overhead, and on the table a piñata-sized pink ostrich Hermès Birkin sitting next to four-and-a-half-inch black Louboutin heels. The Artforum review by Lee Ambrozy reads the dining room as a Mar-a-Lago reference. Monforton herself describes the show as a critique of the spectacle of power.
In the living room, We Are Family (2025) is an astronaut emblazoned with an American flag, built to the artist's height, cradling a slender green Martian child still learning to walk. Gray-felt moving blankets stretched on canvases line the walls and hold paintings of celestial bodies. The den is paneled in 1970s wood-laminate.
A felt blanket embroidered like an American flag is draped, casket-style, over a low table. Sculptures of the United States national seal hang on the walls. So does a taxidermied deer head.
Monforton sold her Brooklyn brownstone in 2021 after 45 years in New York, where she was associate publisher of Bomb. She moved back to Michigan, took a Detroit studio, and started making work full-time at 68. Co-directors Jova Lynne and Marie Madison-Patton are using Heart Land to keep MOCAD's contemporary programming live during the renovation.
The show runs through the museum's reopening on April 25, 2026.
4454 Woodward Avenue, Mobile Homestead lawn, Midtown.
