Watch the Zoom Recording on YouTube

OR

Download the File to Watch Here

EMU: Detroit’s Black Power murals as public art

Inspiring in their time but not well-enough known today, Detroit’s Black Power murals—painted a year after, and in response to the urban uprising of 1967-- were some of the first to move the artistic ideals of the Black Arts movement into public space. Created by Chicago artists with the cooperation of Detroit painters and poets, they combined portraits of contemporary African-American “he-roes and she-roes” with historical scenes and the images of leaders of African anti-colonial movements, juxtaposed with everyman figures that spoke to viewers in the present at street level. 

This talk explores the way the murals functioned amidst Detroit’s racial geography in two ways: as an effort to enlist the nationalist ideas of the Black Arts movement in fostering creative identity and pride through images of African-American achievement and to generate spatially a “Black counterpublic sphere.” Their iconography offered an alternative or counter- history that encouraged Black Detroiters to imagine their place in a new version of the city.

Rebecca Zurier is Associate Professor, History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research focus on art of the United States with special interests in urban studies, political art, and questions of realism and representation. Her book Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles Eldredge Prize. For many years she has taught a seminar titled "Made in Detroit: A History of Art and Culture in the Motor City.”