In Detroit, a 100-Foot Graphic Mural That Distills the Urban Experience

By: Ann Binlot

When Elysia Borowy-Reeder, the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), first glimpsed the graphic geometric shapes and the vivid hues in the New York artist Andrew Kuo’s work, she immediately thought it would be perfect for MOCAD’s Woodward Avenue facade, a space previously covered with murals by the San Francisco artist Barry McGee and by Detroit’s Seventh Letter Crew.

Borowy-Reeder turned to Art Basel and Kickstarter, who had partnered up in 2014 “to catalyze much-needed support for outstanding noncommercial art projects worldwide.” In order to launch the campaign, MOCAD and Kuo had to submit a proposal for the project, which marked a milestone in several respects: the inaugural edition of MOCAD’s Living Canvas series, and also Kuo’s first public artwork. “The Kickstarter campaign, when it starts, everyone had to get together and put together a good presentation,” says Kuo, a regular contributor to The New York Times who creates charts about music for its Arts section. “None of us had ever done that before, so we had a lot of help from Kickstarter.” The campaign launched on June 9 in conjunction with Art Basel, and with 12 days left to go, it raised its goal of $10,000, eventually earning $14,950 in donations — nearly $5,000 more than the proposal called for.

The first time Kuo stopped in Detroit, a city in the midst of what some have called a renaissance, it was for a quick eight hours in 2009 to play a show with his band Hex Message at Garden Bowl while on tour with Gang Gang Dance. When he returned this past summer, the city captured his heart. “I really fell in love with it,” he says. “My impression of it is there’s a lot of people who have been there for a very long time and have been trying to do things for decades, and occasionally you’ll have new people come through like myself, and feel like there’s possibilities, and that idea is not new to them.”

Kuo and his team got to work on the massive wall — 100 feet long, 30 feet tall — during the second week of September. The piece, titled “In Staying/Faces,” is an artful sociological study on Kuo’s experiences as an urban dweller. Each color represents a different feeling; magenta means “The fear of regret vanishes if I don’t touch my phone before 3 a.m.,” while blue is the shade for “Trying something new is just a commitment to a lack of focus.” “All my things have an emotional beginning and attachment, but this one in particular, I really wanted to humanize this chart, and it’s about growing up in New York and traveling to other places and thinking about friends that don’t live here or live anymore at all,” says Kuo. “It’s basically a line chart that I’ve folded up to form geometric shapes of faces.”

Borowy-Reeder hopes “In Staying/Faces” will continue to attract attention to contemporary art in the Motor City. “Longtime residents are seeing a new city, a city on the move to great things with art being at the center of our community,” she says. “And newer residents are seeing Detroit with fresh eyes.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com