The Detroit artist Tyree Guyton, whose colorful and controversial Heidelberg Project transformed entire blocks on the city’s east side into works of art, drawing both praise and critics, has earned the prestigious Kresge Eminent Artist award.
A panel of five local arts professionals chose Guyton, 70, for the honors, which comes with a $100,000 cash prize. A short film and a monograph about Guyton and his work has also been commissioned, set for release this spring.
In a statement, Guyton called the news “surreal,” adding, “I felt like Moses. All I heard clearly was, ‘eminent’ and ‘you’ve been chosen.’ I got real quiet. […] It still feels crazy, after all this time. Me, chosen.”
Kresge Foundation president and CEO Rip Rapson heaped praise.
“Tyree Guyton exemplifies the spirit of a city whose Latin motto – ‘Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus’ – translates to ‘We hope for better things; it shall arise from the ashes,’” Rapson said. “In a 1980s Detroit widely and unjustly disparaged as nothing more than a locus of decline and crime, Guyton garnered international headlines by controversially turning vacant houses into canvases and empty lots into frames for striking assemblages of urban detritus transformed into a kind of gritty beauty.”
He added, “For more than four decades, on the streets of his neighborhood and on gallery walls, Guyton has continued to exemplify ground truth and soaring aspirations, the blues and the abstractions, that are integral to so much of the great art for which this city is known.”
Guyton launched the Heidelberg Project in 1986 in response to the blight that had taken over his childhood neighborhood.
“Art is my medicine; it’s how I make sense, make meaning of the world around me,” he said. “That day, I felt like the street, the city, needed my medicine. I started and I never let anything stop me. I still believe art is the answer.”
The result is a strange tourist destination made by covering abandoned houses with colorful polka dots, discarded toys, and other flotsam and jetsam. Initially, the city deemed it an eyesore, and tried to demolish it twice in the 1990s. And in the early 2010s, other Heidelberg Project structures were damaged by fires in a string of apparent arson attacks.
But Guyton kept creating, and now, he’s considered a fine artist whose work is featured in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, among others.
“As an artist, you want people to recognize you,” he said in a statement. “But you get to a point, especially someone like me, with all the criticism, the trials, tribulations, the fires … you stop caring. You stop thinking about any kind of validation. You keep moving, for yourself.”
The Heidelberg Project, which has since become a nonprofit organization, says it is working on renovating some of its houses into permanent structures, including a welcome center, a community space, and a museum.
Guyton previously won a Kresge Artist Fellowship in 2009.
Related STory
Tyree Guyton’s polka-dotted Heidelberg Project career enters its next phase
In the case of Tyree Guyton, one gets the sense that the artist might see time as a flat circle. At the very least, he certainly believes in the power of a flat circle.…
