Detroit’s Vanishing Graffiti Art

According to Mark Stryker in a July 2015 article in the Detroit’s free press, Detroit has become one of the most vibrant centers of graffiti street art in the country in recent years – in case you didn’t know. He says that hundreds of authorized murals by some of the most famous street artists in the world, as well as works by gifted local artists, grace downtown, Eastern Market, southwest Detroit, the Grand River corridor and other hotspots.
One example is the “Our Land Till Death” by Sintex at 4731 Grand River in Detroit, here depicted as the first and third images in the slider. Stryker describes the work as linking racial and ethnically charged heroes, symbols of resistance and victims – Chief Crazy Horse, Elijah Muhammad, Malice Green, Aiyana Jones and Vincent Chin – to make a point of standing your ground. The mural depicted in slides two and four is located in the Grand River Creative Corridor, a stretch with almost 100 pieces of graffiti art.
The many murals do not only evoke adoration; Violet Ikonomova of the Detroit Metro Times describes in September 2017 that Detroit’s Mayor Mike Duggan established in 2014 a graffiti task force that has aggressively gone after writers and property owners. She reports that the Duggan administration has issued thousands of graffiti blight tickets, put about a dozen writers behind bars, and spent millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
Better come to Detroit and see the fascinating but vanishing murals for yourself before they have been erased!