Canvas Detroit

Hubert Massey

214 HUBERT MASSEY Hubert Massey has covered Detroit, inside and outside, with art. Before he became a known name around the city, Massey spent his days up in the air, sometimes up as high as two hundred feet, painting photorealistic Gannett billboards, in oil, by hand. For thirteen years, he cranked them out like new cars running down the line. The money was good, so was the training of facing a blank canvas day after day. “It was one of the best moves I ever made,” says the Flint, Michigan, native. “I got to learn by making mistakes and I got paid to do it, forty to fifty signs a week, very detailed, all by hand. It helped me see art on a much larger scale and make bigger connections.” The discipline that Massey developed eventually pushed him into a full-time career as a go-to public artist, with a special affinity for frescos, the complex technique of layered painting perfected by Michelangelo and made famous in Detroit by Diego Rivera. Massey, whose commissioned works command as much six hundred dollars per square foot, studied art at the University of London’s Slade Institute of Fine Arts. He is the only commissioned African-American buon fresco painter in the United States, a testament to the skill he acquired while studying with Rivera apprentices Stephen Dimitroff and Lucienne Bloch. Massey also spent time touring and studying the murals of Mexico City. “I’d still like to see the frescos in Italy,” he says. His artistic footprint in Detroit and around the state is almost as broad as the style he loves, including more than thirty outdoor and indoor murals, sculptures, terrazzo designs, pictographs, even stained-glass window projects. Massey’s vision covers the rotunda floor of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. It’s a giant, 37-foot tall, circular terrazzo entitled Ring of Genealogy, which he designed to showcase the lives of pioneering African Americans. says Massey, who only turned to art after a knee injury sidelined him from his role as a star football player at Grand Valley State University. “I come from the era of community engagement. So, I know how important it is to document the legacies of people and communities.” Massey’s installations anchor some of Detroit’s most visible cultural sites. He designed and etched images into two granite murals at Campus Martius, a 2.5-acre public park honored by the Urban Land Institute and by the American Planning Association as one of American’s Great Public Spaces. More than two million people visit Campus Martius each year. “I come into communities and I listen,” Massey says. “My inspiration comes from having forums and getting people involved in the process.” Commuters between Canada and Detroit eye Massey’s work each day as they cross the Ambassador Bridge. Commissioned by the Michigan Department of Transportation, Massey unleashed a torrent of vibrant colors and faces meant to celebrate the history of Latino culture and ethnic diversity in Southwest Detroit. Like virtually all of Massey’s murals, the forty-foot mural, “Spiral of Life,” features a vivid quilt winding through the work and embedded with recognizable and hidden salutes to Latino culture and Detroit history. To Massey, the mission of elevating the art in Detroit is personal. “When I was studying in Europe, one of the things that always struck me was the way people make pilgrimages to see art and the places where things started,” he says. “I think Detroit can be a creative capital for America. So many important things started here; it’s the ideal place to have the conversation through art: the architecture, the first paved highway. And you have the largest fresco painting done by Diego Rivera, right here. This is the place.” Massey is mindful of Detroit’s challenges, its dwindling population, struggling schools, and broken, ineffective government services. Still, his mind is made up. “Right now, there’s a big palette of opportunity, and it’s bigger than the self-serving part of art,” he says. “I want to be part of the change. I want to be one of the people that help guide us forward. I’m not running from Detroit. I feel privileged to live and create here.” 215 “Public art is powerful when you can translate the story of a community into the work. You give people a voice and the art has a function,” he says. “Art has more of a...