Detroit's Murals
Essay written by Bernadette Kelly, 2022
Urban environments often offer brilliant displays of street art and Detroit is no exception. Whether you’re drawn to large murals that decorate the sides of buildings or graffiti sprawled across underpasses, community messages infiltrate your visual experience of a city. I was always enamored by Robert Wyland’s ”Whaling Wall” pictured on this page. The humpback whales swam through Detroit when I journeyed downtown for school field trips and family outings to Comerica Park. Occasionally, the whales painted on Broderick Tower are hidden under large vinyl advertisements for businesses such as Verizon and Jeep who want to utilize the central location. The current one is a new mural by Detroit artist Phil Simpson with the slogan ”Detroit is Home,” sponsored by Rocket Mortgages. While the sentiment is nice and substantially better than the previous large Verizon sign, the marketing strategy feels impersonal—I don’t have stories with that image in the background of my mind. I don’t tell people visiting the city to look for those signs. I tell them to look for the whales.
Murals produce affective responses, become trapped in memories, explain cultural moments and historical facts, revitalize neighborhoods, and inspire crucial conversations about society. The public nature and size of murals help them achieve these outcomes, all of which are associated with placemaking—they are landmarks that bring our attention and consciousness to the environment. But they are also ephemeral. Projects like Joan Beaudoin and Cameron Socha’s Mural Mapping¹ or the Detroit Office of Arts, Culture, and Entrepreneurship’s (Detroit ACE) partnership with CANVS to create a mural hunting app, capture cultural moments and archive them for future generations. In the series of essays to follow, my purpose is to interpret and collect narratives surrounding Detroit murals and street art culture to show how their meaning goes beyond the beauty they bring to the city.