Canvas Detroit

Art and Public Places

This mural in the heart of Eastern Market was painted by Nychos, during his stay in Detroit in the summer of 2013. 124 Art and Public Places Those who think they know Detroit because they’ve watched movies like RoboCop (set in post-apocalyptic Motor City) do not of course know much at all of our city. Take a drive of discovery on the streets of Detroit and you’ll see plenty to make you proud and a lot to make you wince. But of all the surprises that await an open-eyed and open-minded visitor, perhaps the most surprising is the abundance of art. Art peeks out at visitors from graffiti-tagged walls and the banks of Belle Isle, where stone cairns dot the shoreline. Officially blessed artwork includes the glass totems at Campus Martius and Marshall Fredericks’s Spirit of Detroit at city hall. There’s the Joe Louis Fist and the Labor Legacy Monument at Hart Plaza and the ethereal reflecting pool and sculpture garden designed by Minoru Yamasaki at the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University. And lately the Detroit Institute of Arts with its Inside/Out program has begun to playfully post reproductions of classic works in the odd spot here and there around the city. But unofficial artwork must outnumber the official works by many times. Murals and bits of street art enliven community gardens and vacant lots and sides of abandoned buildings throughout the city. Sometimes the official and unofficial blend together. Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project drew so much derision when the artist first began painting his dots more than a quarter-century ago that city crews bulldozed the project twice in the early years. That was before Guyton won acclaim as a genuine American folk artist and his work began showing up in the DIA and other museums. Heidelberg became one of the city’s most-viewed attractions for out-oftown tour groups. This abundance of art in a distressed post-industrial landscape raises so many interesting questions that it’s hard to know where to begin. Is the artwork any good? That is, is it any good by traditional art-critic standards? Well, yes, much of it is quite fine, and certainly public sculpture by the likes of Marshall Fredericks or David Barr and Sergio DeGiusti of the Labor Monument would benefit any city anywhere. Harder to define work by folk artists like Guyton and muralist Chazz Miller matches up well with similar street art found in many other cities. And if some of the graffiti that abounds on Detroit walls is unsightly or derivative, and if some of the hammeredtogether bits of debris erected as totems in community gardens seems more akin to finger painting than art-school work, at least no one can deny the energy behind it. BY John Gallagher 125 Beyond the intrinsic quality of the art itself, though, beyond the question of what any particular work means to any one viewer, lie a couple of broader considerations. Art is good for the soul, but it’s also good for what architects and planners call “place-making.” And however much individual artists may struggle to pay their bills, it appears that art is also good for the broader economy. Take place-making first. The phrase is now a catchall to mean that lively mix of shops and pedestrian street-life as one finds in the best urban centers from Chicago to San Francisco to Paris. The elements of place-making are better understood today than ever; those elements include sidewalk cafes and moveable benches and chairs in city parks, a wealth of small storefront shops, and enough notable landmarks to fix a spot forever in the public’s mind. Art plays its part in this scheme; from the Noguchi fountain on Hart Plaza to Diego Rivera’s murals of Henry Ford’s factory at the DIA, art not only enlivens a public place but also in many cases defines it. Urban planners know this, of course, and have long built artwork into their designs. Belle Isle is rich with works of sculpture, mostly in the classical vein, from monuments celebrating Dante and Schiller to Detroit’s first great equestrian statue, sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady’s tribute to Major General Alpheus Starkey Williams. These works were sited to be focal points, landmarks that help create a sense of orientation on the sprawling...