On Art & Place

Murals are important to Detroit as they capture the city's history, cultural identity, and resilience, providing public spaces with vibrant stories of labor, migration, and social justice. They serve as tools for pride, reclaiming neglected areas, and fostering unity. Iconic murals like those in Eastern Market or Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals bridge generational gaps  and celebrate the diverse communities that shaped Detroit while inspiring hope and transformation amidst the city’s challenges.

The murals of Detroit tend to speak of the city’s racial and cultural geography.  Three examples of this phenomenon are Wall of Dignity, Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals and the mural at the Plaza del Norte Welcome Center by Elton Monroy Durán. These artistic icons envision Detroit and Detroiters with pride, often struggling through many social disasters, and fixing the divides between the city’s East and West Sides.  They create a visual identity for a city burdened with a history of contested struggles over labor, racial equity, and cultural unity.

The Wall of Dignity mural stood on Detroit's East Side and was an important feature of the Black Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Created during a period of simmering racial tension, the mural’s images of strength and endurance express and encourage pride in being African American. Viewing the mural was a communal activity. Its  location within a predominantly Black neighborhood projected a message of empowerment, especially because the East Side had gone through a particularly tough history of segregation and systemic inequality.

Conversely, Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals–  painted in 1932 and 1933 for the garden court inside the Detroit Institute of Arts in Midtown–  speak to the city's industrial core and the desire to mend racial and cultural divisions. The murals show the contributions of African Americans and immigrants among communities whose laborers created the base of Detroit's automotive traditions. Located centrally inside the museum on the central spine of Woodward Avenue, these themes speak to the city's West Side, a neighborhood of many African American workers during the Great Migration who settled into neighborhoods directly related to industrial growth.

The Reconnecting Bagley mural of Plaza del Norte by Elton Monroy Durán was created for the lobby of a public building in Southwest Detroit as a cultural beacon for the area’s  predominantly Latine residents. It depicts community members dancing with beloved figures from Mexican popular culture on an imaginary span of Bagley , a street that  was once what the artist calls “the heart of this community” but that was long-ago demolished for highway construction. In the background, the faces of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo look on from the sky. The mural thus calls out to the Detroit Industry mural while commemorating the contributions of Latin American immigrants to the cultural tapestry of Detroit. This puts the Reconnecting Bagley in striking opposition to the African American-centric cultural touchstones on the East Side. In turn, this contrast shows the complex racial and cultural geography of Detroit as a city. Art can map historical narratives and contemporary identity across Detroit’s East and West divide.

Wall of Pride seen from Twelfth Street. Photo Credit: Mark Rogovin, ca 1969,  gift of Michelle Melin-Rogovin to the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago

Already reeling from the loss of independent growth, white flight, and an increase in racial agitation, Detroit started to confront further hurdles during the mid-1900s. Factories closed, and thousands of white families picked up and moved to the suburbs, abandoning low-income neighborhoods in the city. As one side frequently had more resources than the other, this heightened the dichotomy between East and West Sides. You can still see the legacy of this history today in the way that the Detroit neighborhoods look and feel different from each other.

Written by Camden Wilson