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Still, Johnson and Moran avoid rah-rah rhetoric. They are sensitive to their position as outsiders and know that many Detroiters have grown weary of newcomers (mostly white) blithely treating the city as a blank canvas without regard to the needs and wants of longtime residents who are mostly black. Suburban Detroit gallery owners such as David Klein and Gary Wasserman have opened new spaces in the city, national art and design conferences keep landing here, the street art scene is burgeoning, and the Galapagos Art Space, a commercial entity formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y., is in the process of relocating to Detroit. There has been an explosion of artistic activity in Detroit in recent years as artists and young creatives, attracted by cheap studio space, the promise of endless opportunity and the percolating energy of the city, have moved here in droves. Moran Bondaroff is sponsoring a fund-raising dinner for MOCAD in the cathedral Thursday after the opening. Johnson, the New Yorker, bought the former Woods Cathedral, built in 1925 as the Visitation Catholic Church, for $6,700 at public auction in 2014. Moran Bondaroff gallery opens its inaugural exhibition Thursday in a 50,000-square-foot abandoned cathedral along a gritty stretch of the city's near west side on Webb Avenue at Rosa Parks Boulevard. The result of that 90-second conversation has been a bicoastal partnership in which two gallery owners are reaching across the country to lock hands in Detroit. "I just bought an old church in Detroit." Moran said he was tired of only exhibiting art in the spartan white cubes that have come to define contemporary galleries.
![abandoned life church abandoned life church](https://cherylhoward.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Calvary-PresbyterianAbundant-Life-Christian-Church-12.jpg)
One day in late 2014 at an art fair in Miami they got to talking about the relationship between art and the space in which it's shown. Paul Johnson and Al Moran are old friends who own their own galleries in New York and Los Angeles.