You Can’t Print That: 50 Years of the Fifth Estate

Mobile Homestead, in a lot adjacent to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is a faithful replica of the suburban white ranch house that was the childhood home of Mike Kelley. It was completed in 2013, over a year after the artist took his own life at his home in South Pasadena, California.

Kelley, who considered public art “a pleasure that is forced upon a public that, in most cases, finds no pleasure in it”, dictated that the space should not function as a gallery to display his own work, or the work of artists showing at MoCAD. It exists instead as a kind of community centre. When we were there over the weekend, it housed a collection of ephemera related to the Fifth Estate newspaper.

The nation's oldest underground paper is celebrating its 50t anniversary with a pair of exhibitions this fall. You Can’t Print That: 50 Years of the Fifth Estate, on view inside the Mobile Homestead features archival photographs, editorial cartoons, paintings and memorabilia recalling the iconic events, people, and institutions that informed the newspaper during its earliest days through the present.

The exhibition is co-curated by Peter Werbe and Barbara Logan in association with MOCAD's Curator of Education and Public Engagement, Amy Corle.