Joan Kee
Trinosophes
Detroit, MI, USA
@trinosophes

 

Emailed to Andrea Rosen on June 19, 2020

"Dear Andrea,

I hope all is well. Let me just say I'm so thrilled to have been asked to participate in the Fortune Cookie project. Because we are tight-knit community here in Detroit, I collaborated with my good friend and neighbor, Rebecca Mazzei who is an art critic and the proprietor of Trinosophes, "ground zero" for Detroit's artists and poets. Rather than simply use generic fortunes, I worked with an energetic young company in Utah that specializes in custom vegan fortune cookies. Rebecca sourced all the fortunes from Detroit's poets with a special emphasis on voices of color, including the marvelous Dudley Randall whose poem "a poet is not a jukebox" is a gift onto itself. The fortunes are all taken from particular poems, and in some cases, diaries. We hope they will provide uplift to the work's visitors.

There are 1000 cookies. They were installed by Scott Hocking, one of Detroit's stalwarts in contemporary art and himself a collector of fortunes. I am sharing with you various images we took, including examples of the fortunes, the install, and various shots of the finished work. The space is open by appointment and each Saturday. Kids seem to love this install especially!

Please feel free to use and disseminate the photographs however you wish. I will continue to send further documentation.

With love from Detroit, Joan"