Born Magdalene Arndt in 1940, Leni Sinclair grew up in East Germany listening to jazz artists like Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg. At age 19, Sinclair moved to Detroit to study at Wayne State University. She quickly became involved with the radical political and cultural scene, becoming one of the two members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the city.
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In 1964, she met poet John Sinclair, and married him the following year. Together they set up the Detroit Artists Workshop, a network of communal houses, performance space, and print shop that became the center for the Detroit music scene, attracting the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, all of whom Sinclair photographed.
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Police began targeting the Detroit Artists Workshop, raiding it in 1965 and 1967, and arresting John Sinclair on marijuana charges. Undeterred, the Sinclairs soldiered on, practicing the peace, love, and free vibes of hippie culture before such a thing existed. Throughout it all, they remained dedicated to art, music, and activism, going so far as to establish the White Panther Party to support the work of the Black Panther Party before the term “ally” gained clout.
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With the publication of Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973 (MOCAD and Foggy Notion Books), Sinclair looks back at her extraordinary work documenting the art, music and political scenes of late 1960s Detroit. The book opens at the March on Washington of 1963 and chronicles performances and artists’ events at the Detroit Artists Workshop, early concerts with the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges in the Grande Ballroom, anti-war protests, the Detroit Uprising and the Black Panthers, and Sinclair’s ongoing documentation of Sun Ra, and other luminaries in jazz, blues and rock and roll.
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Here Sinclair looks back at a life on the edge, when radical culture transformed the face of the mainstream forevermore.
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