here's some background info before i continue...
(this is an excerpt from a paper i wrote for my american culture class about community) -
"Another type of community arose in the inner city of Detroit in the 1980s. Tyree Guyton, the African American artist behind the Heidelberg Project, was raised on Heidelberg Street and, at the age of twelve, experienced the wretched result of the Detroit race riots in 1967; poor housing for blacks had led to a massive uprising. What started as a nightly bar raid became a five day-long anarchism that included pillages and fires, in addition to a magnitude of arrests and killings of mainly black people (“Riots in Detroit”). Guyton’s neighborhood was just one black community devastated by these racially based rebellions.
Ultimately, some twenty-one years later, Tyree Guyton took action and designed a creative response to the unending decay and affliction in the area in which he grew up. He started recovering his community with the help of his family and the neighborhood children, thus bringing the people of the broken community together. Collectively, they explored the streets and gathered everyday, discarded objects and junk that Tyree reused as decoration for the houses, yards, and sidewalks of the two-block area. What once were drug-infested, decrepit, and vacant houses, transformed into renovated, visually interesting works of art. Ultimately, the colorful and intriguing neighborhood garnered enough attention to drive the drug dealers out of the region as thousands of people started to visit the recognized site. Today, the Heidelberg Project remains a continually developing work that has revolutionized a rigid inner city community where people once were anxious to walk, even in the daytime, into one which neighbors take pride in and where visitors are many and welcome. This ‘Funky Artistic Cultural Village’ continues to symbolize how many areas in Detroit have been abandoned and the need to save these forgotten neighborhoods (“History”)."
i first went to the heidelberg project with one of my classes sophomore year and i immediately fell in love with it. i love collaged work and this place is like a LIVING collage. people still live in these houses covered in rainbow polka dots and numbers, it is actually incredible (see my pictures). over the michigan-wisconsin game weekend (when NO one was in ann arbor) sam, mandy, jess, and i decided to make a trip to the zoo and the heidelberg project. this was right after i handed in my paper about it. once we got there, parked, and began walking down the street, i immediately recognized a familiar man getting out of his truck. right away i knew it was the artist, tyree guyton, and internally freaked out. he smiled at us but i was too nervous to say anything to him until one of my friends yelled out, "she just did a project on the heidelberg project, she's an art student!" we walked over to him and he said, "you're an art student? prove it." he went and got me a bucket of blue paint and paint brush and told me to paint a polka dot on the street. next, he asked me to draw a picture of a house, with my polka dot on it, and write what i was thinking about when i painted the dot in his sketchbook. the sketchbook was filled with entries from people from all over the world. earlier in the day, some football coach had painted a purple polka dot on the side of a house. the shape of his dot looked just like a football which was coincidental, and quite funny.
