Hank Murta Adams describes Blenko as a living museum.
01:21Hank Murta Adams describes Blenko as a living museum. Oral history interview with Hank Murta Adams by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 7, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:21.
Hank Murta Adams: I taught in Detroit in 1987 and ‘97, but all through there I—and I taught at Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Detroit, Michigan], I taught a lot in the Detroit area, and I took—field trips of students down there often. And my students would just drop their jaw when they’d walk in, I mean it’s just such an astounding place—all the iconography, all the tools, they had no money so you’d pick up a monkey wrench and it would be—I mean, I wish I’d kept better notes, I wish I’d took more photographs—you’d pick up a monkey wrench and it would be repaired like seven times, braised with brass. And instead of buying a new monkey wrench for 20 bucks they would just fix it. They had a welder that looked like the—what’s the name of the first nuclear bomb? It looked like the main seal of a nuclear bomb. I’ll bet you they still have the thing. It was like the first welder ever made, and I mean welding technology changes every six months and this thing was from the thirties. I mean, it was just like, that’s—the whole place had just layers and layers and layers of such beauty, of such—the whole place was a museum.