Alumni kudos! (And front page of Detroit News!)

Kudos to…  Emily Kutil (MSP12).  A former student of the U-M Museum Studies Program, Emily is doing some great work in Detroit.  “Detroit’s Black Bottom: It was once the center of African American life in Detroit, then it was razed in the name of urban renewal.”  Emily has a plan to make Black Bottom visible again. She has embarked on a project to recreate the neighborhood out of about 800 rarely seen photos of individual homes and buildings that she found in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection.  Emily plans to build a virtual Black Bottom, an interactive website that maps the images and allows viewers to put themselves in the middle of those vanished streets, like Google Street View allows for contemporary cityscapes.  Her site also will serve as a platform to collect former residents’ oral histories.  Emily’s work made the front page of today’s Detroit Free Press!  Read the full story here.