Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Michigan Mural History

Written by Megan Flattley, May 2023

Due to their large-scale format, and adherence to physical walls, murals (more so than other forms of visual art) frequently maintain a strong local resonance. Because of their relationship to architecture, murals often respond to the location where they are created, either in terms of style or subject matter. Within the state of Michigan, for example, we have murals that depict the automotive industry, copper mining, local agriculture, and famous Michiganders. Murals are often seen as a “public art” that can facilitate collective viewing and can be found in spaces beyond the white walls of a museum or gallery.

In 1900, Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938) painted Commerce and Agriculture Bringing Wealth to Detroit for the State Savings Bank, a Beaux Arts building constructed on Fort Street in downtown Detroit the same year. Dewing was a product of the Aesthetic Movement and its attendant “art for art’s sake” philosophy. At this time, murals were commonly referred to as “decorations” and they were most often conceived to exist harmoniously with the architecture and other decorative features of the building in which they were painted. Thus, in Commerce and Agriculture, Dewing echoes the Beaux Arts style of the building with an oil on canvas that renders Detroit and its commerce and agriculture allegorically in the form of three female figures. Detroit is the center figure and holds a candle, while Commerce has a globe at her feet, and Agriculture is identifiable by the sheaf of wheat. While today, Commerce and Agriculture is held at the Detroit Institute of Arts, one should always consider the original architectural context when viewing a mural – in this case, the white marble walls, gold ceiling, and bronze fixtures of the State Savings Bank. Originally placed in a lunette above the vault, Dewing’s mural served as an altar to capital. Bailey van Hook describes Dewing’s art as “therapeutic,” because “it was supposed to quiet the businessman’s soul, taking him out of the stressful world of commerce into the soothing realm of aesthetic experience.”1

When the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera came to Detroit in 1932 to paint a mural cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he had an opposing goal: to bring the material reality of the automobile factory floor into a space dedicated to the contemplation and appreciation of art. Whereas the earlier mural movement (of which Dewing was a part) emphasized the philosophy of “art for art’s sake,” the practitioners of the Mexican mural movement held great disdain for that notion and instead saw mural painting as an avenue to social and political transformation. In Detroit, Rivera created a mural cycle that glorified the auto workers whose labor had built the wealth of the city.

The mural cycle Detroit Industry (1932-1933) was commissioned by DIA Director William Valentiner and financed by Edsel Ford, son of the famed industrialist Henry Ford. Valentiner encouraged Rivera to take as his subject “the history of Detroit, or some motif suggesting the development of industry in this town.”2 Rivera chose as his subject Detroit Industry and the resultant mural cycle is the product of his intense study of the largest manufacturing plant in the world at the time: the Ford River Rouge. Rivera spent months visiting the plant, making sketches and utilizing photographs and diagrams, in order to understand the inner workings of the complex and represent them accurately. Rivera viewed the engineers who had devised these plants as true artists. He wrote that, “in all the constructions of man’s past – pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, cathedrals and palaces – there is nothing to equal these.”3

Rivera depicted the production of the automobile in two large panels on the north and south walls of what is today known as the Rivera Court. His vision of Detroit Industry, however, expanded beyond the automotive to include chemical and scientific industry, as well as the agricultural and natural resources required to fuel modern industry. He also depicted Detroit’s working class in monumental form – a subject matter that was not well received at the time by many Detroiters who did not believe that such imagery belonged in a fine arts museum. Today, however, the murals stand as a testament to the multi-racial working class labor that built the city of Detroit.

Rivera elected to work in the medium of muralism because it “has the advantage of speaking a language that can easily be understood by the workers and peasants of all lands.”4 This universal language was deployed when Detroit Industry was used to organize illiterate workers, contributing to the foundation of the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). In 1978, UAW official and foundry worker Reubén Alvarez recalled that, “[w]hen we organized the union at Ford, we used to bring delegations down to see the murals. Those who lacked words brought people down here to sign them on. They were…inspirational.”5 In 1937, Walter Speck (who was head of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A) Arts Program in Detroit) painted the “Ford Riot mural” for the headquarters of the UAW Local 174 depicting scenes from the union’s history. The mural is currently located in the Reuther Library at Wayne State University.

Rivera’s work in Detroit, San Francisco, and New York (along with that of his compatriots José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros) inspired the creation of murals throughout the United States. The Mexican model of state-sponsored mural production was partially adopted under the aegis of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP, 1933–1934), the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts (the Section, 1934–1943), and Works Progress (Projects) Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP, 1934–1943).6 (See The New Deal and Post Office Murals)

Detroit was a key site for another critical moment of mural production in the United States: the Black Power movement and the birth of community muralism in the late 1960s. Community muralism is often created on exterior walls, which offers the public an opportunity to observe the creation process and even to interact with the artist. Community murals take the notion of public art even further than Dewing or Rivera’s Detroit murals as community muralists must often take a more democratic approach to the work’s conception, involving “the public” in the work’s creation, not just in its reception.

The community muralism movement kicked off in Chicago with the Wall of Respect (1967) – a collaborative, outdoor mural painted by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). After working on the Wall of Respect, artists William Walker and Eugene Wade came to Detroit and participated in the creation of three Black Power murals that are, unfortunately, no longer extant: Wall of Dignity (1968), Wall of Pride (1968), and the Harriet Tubman Memorial Wall (Let My People Go) (1969). These Detroit murals are some of the earliest examples of murals on outdoor walls in urban spaces in the United States and highlight the ephemeral nature of muralism and street art.

Today, the city of Detroit in particular is seeing a boom of mural production, much of it driven by municipal funding. The 2012 Detroit Future City report (a ‘Blueprint for Detroit’s Future’) advocated the support of “neighborhood-based public art.” More specifically, it called for the prioritization of revitalization strategies that 1) “promote arts and events spaces and landscapes,” 2) “identify and organize arts or gallery districts,” and 3) “curate and fund the creation of public art.”7 Detroit has several public art and mural initiatives today. Murals in the Market is an annual event in Detroit’s Eastern Market and in 2021, artists Sydney G. James, Thomas “Detour” Evans, and Max Sansing started the bi-annual BLKOUT Walls mural festival to create increased opportunities for muralists of color. Jackson, Michigan also has a public art and mural festival called Bright Walls that has brought more than 75 murals to the city.

The history of muralism in Michigan is rich and varied, ranging from the art-for-art’s sake motivation of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, to the social engagement of Diego Rivera’s mural practice, from the New Deal murals preserved in federal post offices across the state, to the photographic record of the outdoor Black Power murals of Detroit. In their representation of the state (its resources, its industries, and its people) Michigan’s murals serve as a historical record, one that is still being written today by hundreds of mural artists across the state.

  1. Bailey Van Hook, Commerce and Agriculture Bringing Wealth to Detroit: a Mural by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1998: 19. ↩
  2. William Valentiner, Letter to Diego Rivera, May 27, 1931, Detroit Institute of Arts Archive, Detroit, Michigan. ↩
  3. Diego Rivera, “Diego Rivera on Architecture and Mural Painting,” The Architectural Forum 60, no. 1, January, 1934, p 4. ↩
  4. Diego Rivera, “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” The Modern Quarterly 6:3 (Fall 1932): 52-53. ↩
  5. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 235. ↩
  6. Sally Webster and Sylvia Rhor, “Modern Mural Painting in the United States: Shaping Spaces/Shaping Publics” in Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie (eds.) A Companion to Public Art, Wiley Blackwell, 2016. ↩
  7. Cited in Brian Brown, “Re-Picturing the ‘Post-Fordist’ Motor City: Commissioned Street Art in Downtown Detroit,” Architecture_MPS 12:1, 2017: pp. 1-23. https://detroitfuturecity.com/resources/research/ ↩