The Reclamation of Detroit

How unrecognized artists are redefining the nation’s lost city from the inside.

You’ve read the headlines. You’ve seen the pictures. Detroit is dead. Decaying from the inside. The murder capital of the world. America’s forgotten city, slid into a “post-apocalyptic collapse,” waiting for some imminent demise that hasn’t quite happened yet.

Detroit has become the TV news cycle’s poster child for the country’s decline. But the headlines are written by people who haven’t come within a 50 mile radius of the city, who think one radio crime story makes them an expert. Inside the city limits, Detroiters are making new meaning of their city for themselves.

The word reclaim is defined a few ways.

• “to bring (uncultivated areas or wasteland) into a condition for cultivation or other use.”
• “to recover (substances) in a pure or usable form from refuse, discarded articles, etc.”
• “to bring back to a preferable manner of living, sound principles, ideas, etc.”

It’s usually used to describe fighting back overgrown vegetation to reclaim the usefulness of a space, but the idea of “reclamation” sings equally true for this city. In the case of Detroit, artists throughout the city have begun to reclaim empty lots, homes, and even entire neighborhoods, proving that even though they’ve been abandoned by their government and the media machine, they have not been abandoned by their people. A kind of “cultural overgrowth” not terribly unlike the natural one that precedes it.

What grows in spaces that others no longer care to look? What cracks through the concrete in the dark corners of our industrial past? The unkillable and unending human spirit, challenging popular notions of “art” along the way.

Lincoln Street Art Park

Run out of the back of the Recycle Here! neighborhood recycling program, a team of industrial designers collect, cut, and weld together old relics from the area into new celebrations of Detroit culture. The site used to be an illegal dumping spot were people would throw their trash. Now, it’s a hodgepodge of garbage-turned-art.

Matt (on the right below), who was at the time currently managing the installation of a 40 ft. statue in the space, describes the process as “socially conscious urban restoration.” His partner, a Detroit native born-and-raised, describes it more affectionately as “socially conscious urban restoration, mother fucker!” Matt says that his group’s motivation for maintaining the park is simple — it’s better than leaving it full of garbage.

Unique to this “sculpture park” of sorts is that it’s essentially open-sourced. Other artists can come in and add their own pieces, with the only rule being that you don’t alter or deface the works of others. By Detroit, for Detroit.

The Heidelberg Project

Deep in the heart of Detroit’s East Side, the poster child for the city’s crime problem, Tyree Guyton has spent 30 years collecting the artefacts of our urban existences and reflecting them back onto us. Hundreds of toys, old TVs, shoes, signs, cameras, and clocks. Many, many clocks.

The concept of time is a popular theme for Tyree. When asked about the hundreds of illustrated clocks littered throughout the 2–3 blocks of the Heidelberg Project, he’ll turn it back on you. “What time is it?” Before you can check your watch, he’ll remind you that “the time is now.” For him, its both an exercise in mindfulness and being focused on the present, and reminding all whom visit the site that the moment for you to make change in this world is this one.

What motivates this man to spend nearly eight hours a day maintaining this massive project? “It’s my passion. I have to.” Tyree says the one thing he never learned in art school was to see things through his “third eye,” a greater sense of consciousness he’s developed as a result of this project. “Now, I bring that education back to the art school. Now I teach them.”

Power House Productions

Walk around the northeast pocket of Detroit squeezed between cities Highland Park and Hamtramck, and you’re just as likely to find children running around playing as you are seemingly blown-up buildings. Not exactly the most inspiring setting to raise a family? You’re not the only one that thinks so.

Describing themselves as an artist-run neighborhood-based nonprofit organization, the group Power House Productions aims to “develop and implement creative neighborhood stabilization strategies to revitalize and inspire the community.” They take homes and public spaces in this very residential part of Detroit that are essentially uninhabitable and change their image through art. That includes converting empty homes to motivational posters and abandoned lots to community gardens.

Not settling for swooping into a neighborhood and gussying it up, Power House is as much intent on teaching residents of the community artistic practices so that they’re empowered to change the narrative of their own community. They create art, which cultivates more artists, that in turn create more art.

Maybe the most common item you can find reclaimed throughout these neighborhoods-turned-art takeovers is the classic cathode ray tube TV.

These suckers reached their prime at about the same time Detroit did — the proverbial Golden Age of the American 20th century, when fathers drove him from work in their American-made cars to their nuclear homes to gather the family in front of the national theater that was broadcast TV. You’re just as likely to find TVs out on the street now as you are inside of a home.

A symbol of Detroit’s descent? Maybe. Perhaps it represents a rejection of the news media’s notion that they can dictate what it means to be from Detroit. Just maybe, by unplugging these TVs and scrawling their own messages on their blank faces, Detroiters are reminded that it is they who get to write the story about their city. That story may end up on the 9 pm news cast, but it starts on the streets.