Richie Blanko was busy this fall painting a mural at Michigan Central Station when his friend David Fernandez stopped by with a request.
Fernandez, a fellow artist, asked Blanko to join in a project he was envisioning: A mural in honor of his eight-year-old daughter, Laura Fernandez, who died in August.
Fernandez gained permission from Detroit’s City Walls program. Then, in October, Fernandez, Blanko and about 10 other artists began working on the mural near a viaduct on Waterman Street near Stratton.
Over the next few weeks, the blue wall in southwest Detroit took on a Western theme; desert rocks, purple mountains in the background, cacti. On the left side “Laura” was painted in large, purple letters, along with “RIP” in a smaller font.
But by Oct. 23, Fernandez’s tribute to his daughter was gone, the canvas was back to a blank slate. The city’s graffiti team accidentally buffed the wall that had been the past target of multiple graffiti tags, Crystal Perkins, director of the city’s General Services Department, said in a statement.
“The graffiti team works closely with City Walls, but on Oct. 23, the team was not aware that it was a City Walls mural in process,” she said. “We deeply apologize to the artist and support the completion of this mural.”
Blanko said the mural was about halfway done, with plans to add a portrait and cartoon characters, when it was buffed. When he found out the art was erased, Blanko said he was livid, pacing around his house for several days.
“Why did this happen?” Blanko said.
Fernandez declined to talk with BridgeDetroit for this story.
Perkins said officials with GSD met with Fernandez after the incident. He will be paid $5,000 to account for the money lost and will restart work on the mural in the spring, she said.
Erik Paul Howard, a photographer and co-founder of the nonprofit Inside Southwest Detroit, was also upset over the incident and wrote about the mural erasure in the organization’s Southwest Detroiter blog.
Howard told BridgeDetroit the situation meant wasted time and money for Fernandez, Blanko and the others. It also took away a space of healing for Fernandez and the community, “where people can not only remember but express to the people that are left behind how they feel about that loss, which is what mourning is.”
Blanko said he had approved artwork buffed at least two other times by the city and Howard noted another high-profile incident from a decade earlier when the city’s blight team painted over an iconic mural in the community. Howard and Blanko said they remember a mural on Venor and St. Anne streets called Hip-Hop Elements Exposed Throughout Time (HHEETT) that was removed in 2014. Led by artist Victor Villalobos, the graffiti wall was installed in 2000 featuring the work of prominent and aspiring aerosol artists.
“It (HHEETT) was not only a historic graffiti wall in Southwest Detroit, but just a historic mural, period,” Blanko said. “It had been there as long as I had been looking at art. I remember being a kid going by there.”
Added Howard: “We talked about having a quinceañera and it didn’t make it to its 15th birthday.”
Blight and spray paint have a long and controversial history in Detroit. Since Mayor Mike Duggan took office 10 years ago, he has taken a zero-tolerance approach to graffiti as part of a larger campaign against blight. Thousands of blight tickets were issued, several murals have been removed and dozens of graffiti writers were charged with malicious destruction of property. Some artists ended up with felony records.
Howard said beyond making things right after the mistake, equally important is an examination of the city policies that he argues “teed up that behavior” and “allow the city to move like that, in a way that suggests that it’s going to continue.”
A tale of two cities
While city officials continue to crack down on graffiti, the Duggan administration is also embracing public art with several initiatives and projects. Detroit launched the City Walls program in 2017, which hired area artists to replace illegal graffiti with approved art installations. According to Perkins, the program has completed more than 200 murals across the city. Last month, the city unveiled six new murals along the Joe Louis Greenway between Warren Gateway Park and I-96.
Earlier this month, the city announced the installation of five life-size animal sculptures in Southwest Detroit as part of its Bagley Streetscape Project.
In addition, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy opened the Yard Graffiti Museum last year within the Southwest Greenway, a massive undertaking to connect Michigan Central Station to the Detroit River. Perkins said artists also can learn more about other upcoming mural projects on the city’s website.
Detroit’s Code of Ordinances defines graffiti as unauthorized drawings and lettering “intended to deface or mark the appearance” of the exterior of a structure. The city’s codes affirm a “significant governmental interest in protecting its aesthetic values” and mitigating “visual blight.”
Howard said the city is contradicting itself by criminalizing local graffiti artists while touting itself as “Mural City, USA.” He also said officials should make it clearer that City Walls is under the Blight Remediation Division and that using murals to remove blight is the primary goal.
“They’re not even out loud with their policies. The policies that exist and the policies that don’t exist; they create a structure and a void that allows the city to move this way, and it’s oppressive,” he said. “That we cannot have an imagination on our walls in our community in a way that is culturally appropriate for this community, whether we’re uplifting art or social justice, over mourning the loss of our loved ones, these policies marginalize and oppress the community’s agency in these matters, and does it while the city says that they are promoting public art. It’s distressing, you know? It’s frustrating.”
Perkins countered those claims, saying the graffiti team is assigned to remove graffiti vandalism that is related to gangs or offensive language throughout the city including on signs, public art, and property like businesses.
“City Walls commissions and promotes murals to help beautify the city and deter graffiti tagging and vandalism,” she said.
Creating a more collaborative process
Howard hopes to eventually see city officials engage in a participatory process of creating policies on graffiti and murals. He didn’t specify what kind of policies he wants to see, but hopes that artists and community members can have a seat at the table when the city is making decisions about public art.
“If there’s a commitment at that table to create some policies that are informed by that dynamic exchange of information, to meet some of the needs that are brought up at that table, I think we won’t be able to help but have a better environment on the other side of that,” he said. “But also, I think that the city needs to be public about that. They need to publicly commit to that process. Not quietly on a text message or in a one-off phone meeting, or in a meeting where you receive artists one at a time to come in and meet with you.”
Perkins stressed artists and the community do have a seat at the table as each mural project features artists and community members on the selection panel.
“In this specific situation (Fernandez’s piece), the artist didn’t communicate with City Walls about extra graffiti markings being part of the mural for the city to be aware of it,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Blanko wants to see the process for buffing become more regulated and for the city to acknowledge when artworks are erased.
“I don’t want that to keep happening. Where is the accountability?”
Actually there was a mural there already. It was created by A GDYT program run through a local non-profit in 2018. That non-profit does nothing sustainably to and failed to clean and maintain its murals. But that mural a to so part of City Walls so the City should have, in theory reached out to the originally permitted mural creators there. The youth who created the first mural cleaned all the trash and overgrowth at that notoriously filthy, overgrown and poorly lit viaduct that the City has also failed to maintain since.
Due to both parties failure to maintain in the first mural should have been painted over but this speaks to how poorly created and run the City Walls program is. It also should beg the question about GDYT throwing money at youth programs that don’t teach reality to youth. Those kids weren’t taught surface prep or the need to the fund the curation and maintainance of public art. They weren’t taught community engagement around public art or nearby community partners would have known who to contact when t the e mural began to be defaced.
Unfunded and paying for City Wall permits street artists do more maintenance of their work and teaching of sustainable art practices than the grant funded non-profits due. Those same non-profits have been eerily silent while the buffing alarm was raised for fear of losing funding.
A City registered block club, The Springdale Woodmere Block Club, had Mayor Duggan show up at their 2015 viaduct cleaning for a Motor City Makeover photo up. They showed the Mayor thumbnail sketches of the community vetted and inclusive mural they wanted to install there as well as the water damage from topside leaks that were preventing the installation and causing all paint to immediately peel. Then City District 6 Manager Rico Razo climbed to the top of the wall and pulled trees out and promise were made to get the railroad to repair the t up p and the City to repair is the walls so that the mural could be installed. Two year later the City Walls program was createdcreated to live and then head Zach Meers tried multiple times to have other groups come in to our neighborhood and paint murals on the wet wall and told us how the City had to approve of community vetted mural designed by an internationally catalogued artist and community resident who holds three art degrees from Wayne State and curated the then, worlds largest outdoor art pro my ECT for over a year. The City turned itself into a giant HOA with people in charge of approving art and attacking supposed blight who couldn’t would a candle of qualification to the SWBC’s artist.
The City’s approach to blight enforcement has been punitive at best and used for land grabbing at worst. He manipulated former, good riddance, Chief White into using Neighborhood Police Officers in nefarious ways in other precincts instead of having them both educate the communities that know and trust them on blight remediation and cajoling most compliance with positive interactions. Older NPOs all over the City who served because they lived the people bailed into retirement and new NPOs have no street in experience much less time to have developed community relations skills.
Solid reporting and awareness-raising of the city government’s latest anti-street art stumble.
In the headline, however, “mistakenly” would fit better than “accidentally” to describe the intentional erasure. Wrong location would be an accident. Failure to check the City Walls database is a mistake.