It is hard to imagine the future. When I was a young hip hop head in Washington DC in the early 1990s it was inconceivable that icons Ice Cube, LL Cool J, and Ice T would join the police propaganda machine playing cops in mainstream movies and TV shows. What would Biggie think?

S. Trotter seems to ask this question in their piece Rappers Die Every Day B in Swords into Plowshares’ current exhibit Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires. Like Trotter, most of the artists in the show focus on the present and the past rather than that oh so hard to imagine future.

In the present, Mike Williams looks at billionaires’ appropriation of our neighborhoods, children, and very lives from the perspective of Greek and Roman sacrifice. His painting, One Hundred White Bulls, depicts “a symbolic herd of sacrifice” to remind us that we are the resources sacrificed to capitalist greed.

Next to Williams’ piece, Andrea Cardinal’s 26 Billion Dollars visualizes that greed by screen-printing Dan Gilbert’s estimated $26 billion net worth. The billion-dollar notes are a stark reminder that our sacrifices lead to unimaginable amounts of money for the rich.

Looking back to the past, Melanie Bruton’s When Memories Fade depicts a rain-swept fresh produce stand and asks us to consider what it feels like to lose your community. How does it feel when places that brought life feel ghostly? The piece brings to my mind the iconic drawing of “the shooter” by an unknown to me artist on Dequindre Cut. Created when the Cut was a hub of community creativity, today, The Shooter lives in a ghostly emptiness of iron railings, shipping container pop-ups, and surveillance cameras. If you close your eyes on the Cut, you can just about imagine the community of artists with spray cans, people hanging out drinking beer out of brown paper bags, music, relationships growing and failing, and conversations that never end. But the memories are fading as the denizens of the Cut have been moved out to make way for developers building condos funded by our tax dollars through tax increment financing (TIF).

Tax Increment Financing is a way that government “economic development” departments like the Downtown Development Authority and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation “capture” our taxes and redirect them to private businesses without our knowledge or oversight. TIF is not the same as tax abatements. Tax abatements, which developers also receive, are a direct reduction in taxes for a certain period. Tax captures actually take our property taxes and give them to developers to use to pay for their projects.

Dan Gilbert has received more than $618 million through TIF. Ian Matchett’s portrait of Gilbert as an empty suit ready to dump all we hold dear into a trash can counters the prevailing official narrative of Gilbert as a philanthropic billionaire who has brought Detroit back from the trash heap.

And it is so hard to counter this narrative. In the face of the overwhelming propaganda by the City, the media, and even in some cases Detroiters like ourselves, we have to remember that none of the so-called Detroit revival is for our benefit. Gilbert’s theft of the taxes we pay to the City has gone to develop Library Street — when we approved the millage to fund libraries. It has gone to build a glass skyscraper where the Hudson’s building used to be — when we continually ask the City Council to increase the funds for home repairs. It has been used to develop $1,755 a month studio apartments in the Book Tower while we plead for water affordability.

A Future Beyond Billionaires is more than libraries, home repairs, and water affordability. Arthur Rushin III asks us to look for What Lies Yonder? to contemplate whether freedom is in the stars. Not just the stars in the heavens but also the stars in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires is at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Art Gallery, 33 E. Adams Street until December 20, 2025.

Gallery hours Fridays and Saturdays 1 to 6 p.m.

Political Discussion Thursday, December 11 at 6 p.m.

Artist Talk Friday, December 19 at 6 p.m.

Free Parking in the lot behind the gallery. Let the parking attendant know you are visiting the Gallery.

Jo Coutts is a member of Metro Detroit DSA.