American Hotel Chairs - Detroit, Michigan

from the series Institutional by Sean Galbraith, 2010

Artwork Statement

The American Hotel, aka the Fort Wayne Hotel, was an 11-storey, 300-room establishment in downtown Detroit. It operated from 1926 to the early 2000s. Unfortunately, as Detroit’s fortunes changed in the 1960s, so did the hotels. By the time it closed, it had gone from one of the top hotels in the area to the “king of the fleabag hotels”. The hotel first went bankrupt during the Great Depression and changed hands a few times since. By the time I visited in 2010, the hotel rooms had were all almost totally empty of furniture or evidence of past use. Except for one room, which contained these three chairs.

Artist Biography

Sean Galbraith is a self-trained photographer and urban planner in Toronto. With a background in urban design, he looks for patterns, lines and forms that give structure to urban environments. Sean has exhibited in Toronto at the Art Gallery of Ontario Rental + Sales Gallery, galleryDK, Pearson International Airport, Hangman Gallery and the Department of Canadian Heritage, among others. Sean uses medium and large format film. In addition to loving the feel and deliberative process of shooting film, Sean notes that the resulting negatives all for high resolution scans that greatly exceed the capacity of current digital technologies. Sean is a founding member of the DK Photo Group and co-owner of galleryDK. He is also part of a large community of fellow architectural explorers. In 2010 Sean was selected as a winner of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Foward international competition for Emerging Photographers.

Learn more about Sean >

Purchase Details

The prints you receive are archival, photographic prints on a semi-matte paper with a longevity of 100+ years under normal light conditions.

Each print ships with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist, which serves as proof your artwork is a bonafide member of its limited edition. You should keep this in a safe place.

All prices are in American dollars (USD).

Framing

Canadian customer orders are framed in Toronto; orders from the United States are framed in Ohio. All frames come with D-rings for installation. All orders come with our free downloadable installation guide.

Shipping

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