March/April 2012
More than 25 years ago, a Detroit artist started using scrap and found objects to transform abandoned houses into art. The project now has the art world’s respect and is a vital part of Detroit’s rebirth.
By Ann C. Logue
The McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on the east side of Detroit looks the way you’d imagine a Detroit neighborhood would look these days, with run-down houses, vacant lots, and a few struggling churches. Turn down Heidelberg Street between Mount Elliott and Ellery streets, and the scene is different, however. The houses are painted with bright polka dots or plastered with children’s toys. The trees are festooned with shoes painted in pastel colors. Vacant lots are filled with paintings, sculptures, and signs fashioned from scrap materials.
This artistic streetscape is known as the Heidelberg Project, and it is the creation of Tyree Guyton, an artist who grew up on Heidelberg Street. The project, both a commentary on urban decay and an effort at neighborhood revitalization, has been a work in progress for 26 years. Guyton, now 56, says he always wanted to be an artist. He studied at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies but dropped out in 1982. In 1986, he and his grandfather, Sam Mackey, started attaching found objects to abandoned houses in the neighborhood—to change their environment and attempt to make a difference, Guyton says—and they incorporated the project as a nonprofit arts organization in 1988. The neighbors responded, and not happily. They thought Guyton was exacerbating the blight and felt that the tourists, art lovers, and curiosity seekers who visited the project were poking fun at them. By 1991, tensions were so high that Oprah Winfrey devoted an episode of her television show to the Heidelberg Project, pitting Guyton against community organizers. Then-Detroit Mayor Coleman Young ordered the destruction of three abandoned-but-decorated houses on the street. (Ironically, just a year later, Michigan Gov. John Engler honored Guyton as the state’s artist of the year.) In 1999, Mayor Dennis Archer ordered another three Heidelberg Street houses torn down, citing rodent problems.
Today, only eight houses remain on the block that previously had 60 homes, with the remaining lots serving as art spaces for the Heidelberg Project’s creations. Most pieces are made of found objects and scrap materials. Guyton works with a network of pickers from the neighborhood to help him find materials, sourcing some items from the streets and others from scrapyards. Some of the objects are put into place as they are; Guyton paints others to express his point of view. Some works degrade quickly when exposed to the weather, creating space for new pieces the following year. “Everything is connected, and it keeps changing,” he says. Guyton’s work isn’t random, despite what many neighbors thought at first. He creates small-scale studies for his projects, many of which are on display at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
As an artist, he sees symbolism where some see trash, and he looks for visual puns. For example, he includes old shoes in many of his works, using soles as a stand-in for souls. The polka-dot motif, which works well with painted tires, symbolizes how people of different races and cultures come together. He paints faces in unusual colors with bright smiles to show the inner person, independent of skin color. Painted car hoods—one of Guyton’s recent projects—correlate car parts with neighborhoods: hoods in the ’hood. Hoods smashed in accidents are fine, as they suggest the brokenness of many communities.
To celebrate the Heidelberg Project’s silver anniversary last year, the organization displayed 25 reclaimed car hoods at sites around Detroit from May to early August. The installations were a new twist on the fiberglass cows and other street sculptures that other cities have decorated and displayed as symbols of civic pride. Detroit auto workers manufactured the original car hoods that later became scrap, then artistic objects. In essence, the Heidelberg Project recycled the hoods, giving them another lease on life as artworks around the city.
Artful “Medicine”
Though many Heidelberg Street residents did not like Guyton’s work at first, they can’t deny the beneficial effects of the attention the project has drawn to the community. Jenenne Whitfield, executive director of the Heidelberg Project and Guyton’s wife, says her husband sought for his art to be a “medicine” for the neighborhood, hoping the initial shock would lead to change and appreciation for the people who live in the area. Transforming discarded items into art could serve as a metaphor for transforming one’s own life and environment. “What if you pick these things up, dust them off, and add color?” Whitfield asks. “What if we do that in the community? Now there’s a sense of pride.” The project has inspired some neighbors to paint their houses and transform their yards into art spaces. Another artist, Tim Burke, moved to Heidelberg Street to create his own artistic works through his Detroit Industrial Gallery. “I moved here because it’s where the artist community is happening, and I wanted to be part of that,” he says in a video on the Heidelberg Project website.
In the best outsider-art style, the Heidelberg Project has gone from a spontaneous effort the neighbors initially resisted to a movement the art establishment has embraced. Richard Rogers of the College for Creative Studies praises the project for asking important questions about the nature of community and neighborhood, how people connect, and how they can strengthen the bonds that hold a city together. “There’s nothing like it anywhere,” he says in a Heidelberg Project video. Collectors now pay considerable sums for Guyton’s paintings and sculptures. Museums, the BBC, and an Emmy-winning documentary all have featured his work. In 2009, the College for Creative Studies offered Guyton an honorary doctorate, but he asked if he could instead do the work to receive a full degree, which he did. The Heidelberg Project itself has expanded to include arts education for children, an annual neighborhood arts festival, and programs that include field trips, summer camps, and volunteer painting days. There, children learn they don’t need to use expensive materials to create art; they can use whatever materials are at hand.
The project itself is entering a new phase. Guyton and the nonprofit’s staff currently work out of office and studio space in the gentrified Midtown neighborhood a few miles away, a situation they don’t like. They have plans to expand their presence in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood with a cultural center called the House That Makes Sense, which will hold offices, galleries, artist work spaces, and a children’s center. Beth Diamond, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Mich.), and student Nick Lavelle created the plans for the new center, which they have designed to incorporate scrap materials such as recovered wood, windshields from end-of-life vehicles, and bales of scrap metal. Diamond learned about the use of automotive glass in structures from another architecture project, a chapel built in 2000 in Mason’s Bend, Ala. She hopes to use the scrap metal bales in the same way other structures use straw bales as structural elements, though the design still must undergo feasibility and engineering studies. “Tyree has been using scrap as an artistic medium, and I wanted to use it in a permanent structure,” she explains.
The Heidelberg Project has $300,000 in grant funding for the center’s pre-construction phase, including land acquisition, but it is raising more funds for the actual construction. So far, the city has been supportive of the project. As Diamond says, “Things are being remade from scraps of material that have been left behind,” and Detroiters know that’s good for the future. The only significant change she had to make to her design was to incorporate a 100-car parking lot. Groundbreaking for the visitor center is planned for late 2012, Whitfield says.
The Heidelberg Project of today grew out of Guyton’s initial desire to change his environment, but it has grown to change much more than the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. That’s icing on the cake for Guyton, whose goal was more modest. “If I can just do one little, small thing to help the city to come back, I’ve done my job,” he says in a Heidelberg Project video. “That’s how I want to be remembered.”
Ann C. Logue is a Chicago-based writer. For more on the Heidelberg Project, visit www.heidelberg.org.
More than 25 years ago, a Detroit artist started using scrap and found objects to transform abandoned houses into art. The project now has the art world’s respect and is a vital part of Detroit’s rebirth.