The Heidelberg Project: Polka Dots on Devastation

Tyree Guyton grew up on Heidelberg Street on Detroit's east side. When he came back to the neighborhood in nineteen eighty-six, after a stint in the United States Army, he found a block that had been largely abandoned: houses boarded up, lots vacant, the institutional infrastructure of the street simply gone. He started painting polka dots.

That is the literal beginning. Guyton painted dots on the houses, on the street, on trees, on everything. He began attaching objects he found in the abandoned lots and trash heaps of the neighborhood to the house facades: shoes, stuffed animals, clocks, bicycles, toys, televisions, car hoods. Each accumulation became a statement. The Dotty Wotty House, the Fun House, the Vehicle House. The project spread from one building to a block, and from one block to a recognized outdoor art environment known internationally.

The city of Detroit demolished portions of the Heidelberg Project several times, including in nineteen ninety-one and nineteen ninety-nine, under mayors who considered it blight. Each time, Guyton rebuilt and expanded. The project was eventually recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and drew visitors from more than one hundred countries. Several of the structures burned in fires of unknown origin in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen.

What the Heidelberg Project did that no city plan accomplished was hold people in a neighborhood that had every reason to be emptied. Guyton's neighbors, who had stayed on the block through the years when everything around them was being abandoned, became caretakers of an outdoor museum. The art gave the street a reason for strangers to visit. That is not nothing in a city where entire zip codes had been written off.