Artist Tyree Guyton has waged a personal war on urban blight, transforming a broken down neighbourhood on Detroit’s East Side street into a living art gallery.

 

Geraldine Royds looks at The Heidelberg Project. 

Prior to becoming an artist, Tyree Guyton worked as a firefighter, an autoworker and served in the army. Following his stint in the military, Tyree came back to his childhood neighbourhood and was astonished to see that it look like a bombsite.  The area had begun to deteriorate after the 1967 riots in Detroit and seventy five percent of the locals were now on the poverty line. Tyree began The Heidelberg Project partly as a political protest.

 

 

At first, he and his grandfather painted a series of houses on Heidelberg Street with bright dots of many colors, decorating the empty lots and attaching discarded objects to the houses.

Tyree worked on the project every day with the children on the block using art to build a sense of community as well as to brighten up the neighbourhood.  It was a constantly evolving work that transformed a hard-core inner-city area where people were afraid to walk, even in daytime, into the city's first indoor and outdoor museum. At the other end of the street, there are crumbling houses, rubble and rubbish, with no people in sight while Heidelberg Street is a place in which locals take pride and is a now a popular destination for Detroit tourists.

The City of Detroit twice tried to bulldoze the Heidelberg Project. In 1991, and again in 1999, embellished houses, including ‘The Baby Doll House' and ‘Happy Feet’, were completely demolished.  The 1999 demolition did, however, result in a civil lawsuit against the City of Detroit which ended in a ruling which now protects the project.

Tyree Guyton is recognized as an artist, educator and community leader. He and his partner Jenenne Whitfield, have spent twenty years raising awareness about urban decay, offering a new approach to the problem of ‘shrinking cities’ and inspiring young people to take ownership of their neighborhoods.

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