This past Saturday, Vito Valdez, an artist of local fame, held a workshop to get ideas from the community for one of his mural projects. A few weeks ago, he had gotten ideas submitted in word form. The workshop participants (including one elected official) took these words and sketched a few different ways these words could take shape on the mural.
This particular mural, to be very close to greedy billionaire Matty Moroun's decrepit train station, is funded by a grant from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which is different from the project he’s doing with a matching funds grant from the Knight Foundation. Oops, sorry, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, though the Miami Foundation is probably in the mix.
Community input is very important to Valdez, who has lived in the neighborhood for almost all his life, and it would be so even if it was not required by either LISC or Knight.
It’s a long and painstaking process. Just the first stage, with the textual community input, presents several minor dilemmas with near redundancies and not quite duplicates. For instance, one suggestion was to include the Mayan calendar and another to include the Aztec calendar. These are similar mathematically and aesthetically, but also different enough that simply choosing one or the other may or may not be a good idea.
From what I can tell, the LISC contract is much simpler than the Knight contract (I know because I still have a 20-page contract with the Miami Foundation that I declined to sign). I believe Valdez is following his Knight and/or Miami contract as well as someone who is not a lawyer is able to do.
With the Knight matching fund grants, artists are likely to be flooded with boneheaded ideas from people who wind up not contributing money for the match; don’t expect the Knight mural to be completed or at least progress this year.
The LISC contract (which may be a verbal contract for all I know) is an upfront grant, enabling Valdez to get to the actual mural painting much sooner. Before September is LISC’s hope, in time for the Open Streets Detroit initiative.
During the workshop session, Valdez kept saying that the mural “is public art, art for the people.” That sounds obvious, right? It doesn’t need to be said that a city is not a blank canvas for out-of-town artists to come in and paint it with murals they would not want in their own hometowns. And yet, it needs to be said in Detroit.
Andrew Pisacane’s very offensive mural
One example of the need for transparent mural planning is Andrew Pisacane, who calls himself Gaia for some reason. Supposedly, he wanted to memorialize Vincent Chin in a mural in 2014.
A little bit of history very quickly: Vincent Chin was killed in 1982 by Ronald Ebens, with Michael Nitz as an accomplice. Judge Charles Kaufman sentenced Ebens and Nitz to probation and a fine, but no jail time.
Ebens, Nitz, Kaufman, those are three names that I won’t mention again today but which you’ll want to refer to later. Lily Chin, the mother of the victim, heartbroken and disappointed by this miscarriage of justice, moved back to China.
So in 2014, Pisacane sketched a mural showing Lily’s hands holding a photo of Vincent, and showed that sketch to American Citizens for Justice, an organization founded in the aftermath of the hate crime. It would have been a very nice mural, if it had been just the mother’s hands with the portrait of the victim.
But no, Pisacane also had to show off how much he knows about world history, and he also included in the mural Ludwig Erhard, Sun Yun-suan and Hayato Ikeda, three men who had nothing to do with Chin's murder, and at least one of whom died long before Chin.
Pisacane included these three men irrelevant to Chin’s murder because he “wanted to extend the piece beyond remembrance” and show “post war economic miracles as a portrait of global competition that led to layoffs in Detroit and fueled the frustration and xenophobia behind Vincent Chin’s murder.”
It sounds to me like Pisacane is making excuses for the killers. If only Erhard hadn't guided Germany's postwar recovery, Chin might still be alive! If only Yun-Suan hadn’t been instrumental in Taiwan’s economic development in the 1970s… you get the idea. Of course that was not Pisacane’s intention, his intention was to show off his knowledge. That knowledge includes knowledge of the German word Wirtschaftswunder.
Well, I got a German word for Pisacane: Wunderschmuck. Pisacane has been featured by Forbes magazine, which leads me to believe he’s wealthy, or at least wealthy compared to most artists.
Pisacane was given the space for the mural by Derek Weaver, a businessman who has given some support to the arts in this city. The space previously had a mural by Brian Glass, an irascible and too-easily demonized Detroit artist better known as Sintex, who after a few weeks erased Pisacane’s mural to reveal his original mural and then painted a new mural, this one also including Vincent Chin.
Weaver sent out a ridiculous press release expressing condolences to Chin’s family for the erasure of Pisacane’s mural. The local news media repeated the ridiculous press release uncritically. If only there had been a local Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers to lampoon that.
Glass didn’t help his case by declaring Detroit a “no-fly-zone.” Weaver and other businessmen felt very smart with their silly suggestion that Glass should go to the Detroit Institute of Arts and protest Diego Rivera’s mural. But comparing Diego Rivera to Andrew Pisacane is an insult to Diego Rivera.
Pisacane’s very offensive mural is an example of poor mural planning, and probably deception, too: I am neither the first nor the last to ask whether Pisacane previewed his entire concept, not just the nice, remembrance part of it. No one has given me a straight answer.
The Our/Detroit Vodka mural
I remain confused as to whether the Hygienic Dress League is one artist or a group of artists; for now I will assume the latter. They are a contrast to Pisacane in that they seem completely uninterested in showing off book knowledge in their murals.
Our/Detroit Vodka distills vodka with a distinctively Detroit taste right in the city (I thought vodka was supposed to be just neutral-tasting alcohol, but whatever). When the distillery was starting out, the owners hired the Hygienic Dress League to do a mural on one of the exterior walls.
The mural did not impress me positively or negatively. I wouldn’t have guessed anyone would be offended. A few days later it was vandalized with the words “no gentries,” a reference to gentrification.
The owners could have asserted that they had the right to decorate their place of business in whatever way they wanted. But perhaps they understood that would not have gone over well in a community that was already worried that a vodka distillery would bring crime to the neighborhood.
So the distillery owners decided to have a mural contest. Not the best idea, but much better than having the Hygienic Dress League repaint the mural. The contest resulted in a nice mural by Ndubisi Okoye and Ryan Wright.
Initially there had been some talk of having mural contests at periodic intervals, but the Okoye and Wright mural is nice enough that no one seems to object to it staying for as long as the distillery is in business.
What can elected officials do?
Arrogant artists like Andrew Pisacane like to wrap themselves up in the First Amendment. It’s as if his freedom of expression is the most important thing in the world, and the opinion of the community residents is the least important.
The invocation of the First Amendment often causes politicians to back away and not take any action. In Detroit, Mayor Mike Duggan (D) tried to crack down on artists who paint without permission, which on its face seems a very sensible distinction.
But after Weaver made a big spectacle out of being arrested for murals he had granted permission for, many business owners have been afraid to have authorized murals on their properties for fear of being arrested. This leads to frustration as their blank walls are seen as invitations for unauthorized artwork.
Councilwoman Raquel Castañeda-López (D-Detroit, District 6) and her colleagues on the City Council have been discussing the proper place of public art in the city. She showed up to Valdez’s mural planning session and even offered a few suggestions.
“I can’t draw well," Castañeda-López said, but, in my opinion, drew well enough that Valdez was able to understand her ideas and consider including them in the mural.
By having workshop sessions for community input, Valdez will be able to avoid the pitfalls of Pisacane and the Hygienic Dress League, and enable elected officials to understand how public art can actually be of benefit to the community.