Writing Urban Space: Street Art,Democracy,and Photographic Cartography

Abstract

In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit (N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in “creative cities” such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.

Keywords

photography street art democracy cartography critical qualitative inquiry

“STREET ART IS SANCTIONED” under the Public Visual Space Act. So reads the sign posted at the fringe of the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. This policy, however, does not actually exist. The sign was crafted by visual street artists Timeanddesire¹ via code 4U2C. In other words, this is not an act that has been codified through legislation; rather, this is an act of resistance that reclaims space in the public line of sight.

Although this sign is located on an actual street, the sign also is situated broadly within what Giardina and Denzin (2013) term “the street (or the place in which neoliberal engagements are faced head on)” (p. 445, emphasis in original). The street takes on both sets of meaning in this article: It is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art, including signage and other forms of post-graffiti. Municipal authorities seek to stop them. These battles over space occur because the street “is public in its orientation and in its creation, in its access and in its passage, yet private in its strictures” (Newman & Shields, 2013, p. 521).

In response, this article seeks to examine how street art engages public visual space through a qualitative inquiry of the street (Newman & Shields, 2013). The article begins with a description of street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti. Then, using the placement of Timeanddesire’s sign and its arrows to demarcate an urban block of diverse street art, I draw from more than 800 images collected over a 7-month period to illustrate how street art calls into question not only where public space might be located but also who has the right to use it. A photographic cartography illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” in the city through critical discussions of racism, decolonization, and gentrification. Finally, street art is discussed within the context of urban renewal policies. Because many street artists simultaneously undermine and support neoliberal policies by providing (un)invited art, the role of the arts in revitalizing cities is becoming increasingly complex. As one street artist seeks legal injunctions to protect her work, another faces legal charges. Yet others are navigating tensions between longtime local artists and an influx of outside artists who—while sharing similar social justice aims—are credited with re-inscribing urban space. As “creative city” discourses drive urban redevelopment in Detroit and elsewhere, it is important to examine how and what members of a diverse public communicate as they exercise their right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996).

Street Art

Street art belongs to a counterculture movement that defies imposed order and rules. In this sense, a laisse faire approach to art does not lend itself to easy classification systems. This is particularly the case given that key terms such as street art, graffiti, and murals often are used interchangeably. As the differences therein conflate, two arguments have been advanced with regard to whether or not the separation of terms is significant. The first argument views differences among street art, graffiti, and murals as inconsistent and potentially hegemonic. For McAuliffe (2012), the “sometimes arbitrary separation of graffiti from street art by metropolitan agencies has allowed an embrace and even valorization of the power of ‘street art’ to activate space, at a time of increasing criminalization of ‘graffiti’” (p. 190). Within this dichotomy, street art is “good” and graffiti is “bad.” The second argument, in contrast, approaches street art, murals, and graffiti as separate, yet related, artistic phenomena. This argument attends less to the consequences of labeling art and more to aesthetic forms of difference. Given the extent to which street art, murals, and graffiti have evolved, the second set of arguments suggests that the terms be updated and more carefully considered as overlapping yet discrete art forms (Dickens, 2008; Kramer, 2010). Although not insensitive to the implications of naming, this article views these categories as fluid and chooses to make loose distinctions among street art, murals, and graffiti.

In adopting a broader stance toward the growing diversity of street art, scholars recently have begun to conceptualize street art as either a subculture of graffiti or a form of post-graffiti (McAuliffe, 2012). This has led to not only a broader examination of street art methods in research but also a different conceptualization of what it is that urban street artists are doing. Rather than engaging in deviant acts, some contemporary scholars describe urban street art as an act of non-violent civil disobedience (Irvine, 2012). While still acknowledging that much of street art is not authorized, there are contemporary scholars who now approach graffiti and other types of street art as critical rather than criminal forms of communication. As this has occurred, street art has taken on more specific meanings and has proliferated into a number of recognizable forms that include, but are not limited to, the following: stencils, stickers, paper paste-ups, posters, and reverse graffiti (see Table 1). Street artists prepare many of these materials in advance within the privacy of their own studios, which ensures that pieces can be placed quickly within “time lean” and “zero tolerance” urban conditions (Dickens, 2008). With the international success of street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, the genre has come into its own.

Table 1.

Glossary of Terms.

Term	Artistic method
Graffiti	Creating “tags” and “pieces” through stylized words and text, often with spray paint in aerosol cans
Graffito	The singular of graffiti; an inscription or drawing on a public surface
Piece	A graffiti mural
Tag	The personal signature of an artist or crew, often written, repetitively, to gain recognition or mark territory
Street art	Visual art placed in public spaces, usually without permission; includes traditional graffiti; also referred to as post-graffiti or urban art
Paper paste-ups	Art printed on paper and affixed to walls with wheatpaste
Posters	Large, printed placards and bills that often are used to announce or advertise; in smaller form, may be referred to as paper fliers
Reverse graffiti	The removal of rust or dirt from surfaces with cleaning solvents
Scratchiti	Etchings made on glass and plastic surfaces with sharp objects
Signage	Official-looking metal signs placed in public thoroughfares
Stencils	Words or images cut into a thin piece of plastic, cardboard, or metal; spray paint then covers the surface to leave a print below
Stickers	Pre-made labels, name tags, shipping labels, and stickers placed on garbage receptacles, signs, letter boxes, and similar surfaces; used in sticker bombing, sticker tagging, and culture jamming
Street installations	Three-dimensional art placed in, and worked into, urban settings
Murals	A large painting or visual artwork situated on a wall

Note. Definitions are adapted from Dickens (2008), Gerbaudo (2014), Keys (2008), Lachmann (1988), McAuliffe (2012), and urbandictionary.com. Other non-traditional sources such as Wikipedia document current trends in street art (e.g., cup-rocking, fly-posters, video projections, woodblocking, yarn bombing, Lock On sculptures). This list is by no means exhaustive.

Importantly, street artists situate their work within the city to demonstrate how urban space is not neutral. In an insightful analysis of street art, Irvine (2012) observes that street artists “understand that publically viewable space, normally regulated by property and commercial regimes for controlling visibility, can be appropriated for unconstrained, uncontainable, antagonist acts” (p. 8). As he describes, street artists re-appropriate public visual space in response to not only contested areas within cities but also within larger efforts to both re-image and re-imagine the city. Street artists, therefore, are producing work that calls the city out on what it is while imagining what it could become. The battle for space is as much for the present moment as it is for a more socially just future. Thus, street artists who are

seriously working in the genre begin with a deep identification and empathy with the city: they are compelled to state something in and with the city, whether as forms of protest, critique, irony, humor, beauty, subversion, clever prank or all of the above. (Irvine, 2012, p. 237, emphasis in original)

In these regards, critical geographer Henri Lefebvre (1996) might suggest that street artists are (re)claiming the right to the city.

The Street as Inquiry

The street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder. All the elements of urban life, which are fixed and redundant elsewhere, are free to fill the streets and through the streets flow to the centers, where they meet and interact, torn from their fixed abode. This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises. (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, pp. 18-19, emphasis added)

Lefebvre (1974/1991) often wrote on how space is produced within cities, and how cities, in turn, produce space and everyday rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004). And, as in the passage above, he wrote about the street as a place of vibrant, disorderly discourse. Writing the city was an important theoretical and methodological project for Lefebvre (1970/2003)—one that has extended far beyond his initial calls for action. Although Lefebvre first offered these theories nearly 50 years ago, street artists continue to write urban space today. For Lefebvre (1996), “there is the writing of the city: what is inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their linkages, in brief, the use of time in the city by its inhabitants” (p. 115, emphasis in original).

As such, this article writes the city through a qualitative inquiry of the street (Newman & Shields, 2013). This is an embodied form of inquiry in which writing is secondary and “must be done with the intent of exposure, experimentation, imagination, and as testament to the pushing of the limits of logic and sensation” (p. 526). The act of writing is necessarily postponed to first “experiment with moving yourself into and out of the artificial rhythms to which we are subjected, into and out of the ordered spaces that frame our productivity” (p. 525, emphasis in original). Accordingly, I lingered in the streets. Listening. Fall supplanted late summer, only to be replaced soon thereafter with winter. The periphery moved to the center as I kept walking, moving, flowing, experiencing, thinking, moving in concert with the art, becoming “a part of the living ecology of the street” (p. 526). As I became entangled with the street and its environs (Figure 1), I “abandon[ed], temporarily, [my] desire to write and to order” (p. 525).

Figure 1.

Accidental self-portrait.

Where “Street Art Is Sanctioned”

The area illustrated in subsequent photographs is located within Detroit’s Eastern Market neighborhood, a historic district within the city that has begun to experience pockets of revitalization. On peak Saturdays, the area becomes the largest outdoor food market in the country as tens of thousands of people frequent not only the large, centrally located brick “sheds” but also surrounding local eateries, food trucks, and wholesale distributors. On the way to surging popularity, it is perhaps fair to say that the market has faced its share of challenges. Whether or not the historic public market would be able to continue to exist—much less thrive—was an ongoing question throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. As Gallagher (2013) documents, it was a contentious public–private partnership agreement in 2006 that allowed the City of Detroit “to keep ownership over the market but cede virtually all control” to what is now the Eastern Market Corporation (p. 46). It also is important to note that until recently, the greater neighborhood area has been more industrial than commercial.

In exploring the outer edges of the market each week, I had noticed an especially active block in which new street art regularly appeared. I also was aware that 45 new murals would soon be painted in and around the market as part of a mural festival. Event organizers intended to turn the area “into the epicenter of the city’s burgeoning public art movement . . . and deepen the market’s cultural legacy by transforming it into a must-see public art destination” (Murals in the Market, 2015, para. 1). A local journalist was somewhat blunter in observing that the festival “underscores the increasingly visible role that outdoor murals are playing in revitalizing Detroit and how street art has moved from the shadows of illegal graffiti to sanctioned murals embraced by businesses and city hall” (Stryker, 2015, para. 3). Although excited about the possibility of new public art, I recognized that Eastern Market already contained a large number of murals and was concerned that a visually rich block might soon be covered with more “appropriate” art. This led me to more thoughtfully contemplate the hierarchies among different forms of street art, as well as notions of what constitutes public space and to whom public space belongs. Not knowing precisely when or where or even if any new murals would be placed in that particular block, I spent time with the art most Saturday mornings over the next 7 months.

With a few notable exceptions, the majority of the block is composed of what might be described as “non-places” (Augé, 2008), or the spaces through which we mindlessly traverse because they do not seem distinctive enough to actively register. Augé lists grocery store aisles as an example of “non-places.” This perhaps is somewhat ironic as Eastern Market functions as a proxy grocery store for many Detroiters, including myself. Given that the ratio of residents to national brand grocery stores in Detroit is approximately 700,000:1, grocery stores also take on a more literal meaning as “non-places” in the city. It is difficult to understate the politics of food in the city, which may serve as partial explanation for why this particular part of Eastern Market has received so much attention from street artists.

In addition, it may or may not be significant that the block contains creative industries such as an activist letterpress and an art gallery with an associated residency program for emerging visual artists. (This is not to speculate or attribute any unauthorized work to these sources, but to observe that several artistic venues are nearby.) Other businesses include a recent distillery and multiple long-standing butcher shops; several buildings appear to be at least partially abandoned. In a marker of creeping gentrification, an upscale pet accessory shop is located within the site. Two blocks away, a new specialty boutique sells, among other designer items, US$1,200 shoes.

Using the signpost in Figure 2 to demarcate an urban block of diverse street art, I examined street art located within the boundaries of the East Fisher Service Drive and Riopelle, Winder, and Orleans streets. There, I photographed the movement of street art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, gutters, an alleyway, and four dumpsters over a 7-month span. All forms of street art and post-graffiti were of interest, including a graffiti-covered van driven by a local artist. Digital images were captured using an iPhone camera. The 14 images that appear within the article were drawn from 806 total images. Image collection additionally followed the visual and digital methods of Pink (2011a, 2011b), in tandem with the walking methods of Ingold (2004, 2010).

Figure 2.

Street art is sanctioned.

A Photographic Cartography (of Fault Lines)

Images are displayed as photographic cartography, a form of critical visual mapping that emphasizes space over place. Notably, photographic cartography neither seeks to visually document an entire site nor discursively document every critical conversation therein. Rather, it is a partial, arts-based text that, prior to a discussion of findings, invites readers to experience images for themselves (Ulmer, 2016). It builds upon “performative geography” through sensory images, and, in the process, “revises the teleology of mapping by unfixing the knower and the known, the cartographer and the placed data” (Gemeinboeck, Dong, & Veronesi, 2007, p. 11). Whereas locative mappings would place images within geospatial coordinates, timestamps, or wide-lens panoramics, photographic cartography instead works within open cartographic space (e.g., Doel, 1999; Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). Developed here within the context of street art, it could be used to demonstrate visual discourse in other settings, as well.

Photographic cartography illustrates critical markers that occur along material-discursive “fault line[s]” (Gemeinboeck et al., 2007, p. 3). In geography, fault lines are surface fractures that result from the disruptive movement of tectonic plates; in photographic cartography, they are much the same. Public space hosts visible friction between street art and neoliberal urban policy, as street art aims to produce evidence of democracy that neoliberal policies seek to erase. A photographic cartography thus forms a “a collection of both private and public spaces and places, which include buildings, squares, streets, landscapes, and ecosystems, and the processes, mindscapes, and people that make up and shape any environment” (Haas & Olsson, 2014, p. 60). Within Detroit and other sites of urban renewal, therefore, visual fault lines emerge within contested public space. Through text and images gathered from the site, the following cartography documents but a few fault lines that have emerged on route to the “creative city.”

PHOTOGRAPHIC CARTOGRAPHY ———————————————————

IN ART TRUST IN ART TRUST IN ART TRUST IN ART TRUST IN ART TRUST IN

“No to SPRAY unless you OBEY.”

Dear suburbs,

Why do we scare you?

black Detroit.

Dear suburbs,

You scare us.—Black Detroit.

“CAUTION: Magnetic materials. Authorized use only. Mobile mass-media storage device. Contains chemicals known to the State of California to be linked to premature thought.”

BAD DATA BAD DATA BAD DATA BAD DATA BAD

“little visual love letter to the city”

(Jackman, 2015, para. 1).

Video link:

birdO + Detroit (a street art film) (Rugg, 2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lpKOhGCMn0

———————– PHOTOGRAPHIC CARTOGRAPHY

Decolonizing Space

The images in this photographic cartography range in scope and intensity. Some display a playful affection for urban space, whereas others activate critical awareness through art, challenge anti-graffiti policies, or mark sites of gentrification. Yet, others are projects that implicate racism and colonialism in the spatial constructions of the city. Such issues, however, are not new to Detroit. Rather, a history of racial injustice and colonizing housing patterns are precursors to the function of street art in this “creative city.” The following discussions of injustice, albeit partial, offer insight into the historical and contemporary contexts in which these images are situated.

Although Detroit has been a city of hope throughout much of modern history, for many, its promise has remained unrealized. As a port city on the Underground Railroad in the 1800s, “Detroit earned a unique code name, ‘Midnight,’ meaning the last stop before freedom dawned” (Frost & Tucker, 2016, p. 13). When Henry Ford began to offer a “Five Dollar Day” minimum wage in 1914 regardless of race, he created economic opportunity “on a wider, more inclusive scale than any employer had before” (Bates, 2012, p. 2). An influx of African American workers migrated into the city from the South. With them came the Ku Klux Klan (Farley, Danziger, & Holzer, 2000; Rubenstein & Ziewacz, 2014). By the time World War II ended and Detroit was no longer needed in its role as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” the city had become “a model of racial segregation. Blacks were herded into a thirty-block ghetto called Paradise Valley, and the Detroit Housing Commission and fifty ‘neighborhood improvement associations,’ aided by the Ku Klux Klan, kept them there” (Rubenstein & Ziewacz, 2014, p. 256). Major incidents of civil unrest ensued in 1943 and 1967. Uprisings stemmed, in part, from discriminatory housing practices within real estate, financial lending, and federal policy-making sectors (e.g., Schwartz, 2014; Sugrue, 2014).

For example, a wall was constructed in Detroit to separate a White neighborhood from a Black neighborhood. The 6-foot-tall, half-mile-long concrete barrier was built in 1941 to satisfy Federal Housing Authority regulations. At that time, mortgages only were insured in racially homogeneous areas (Thomas, 2013). The wall still stands today. Although the neighborhoods are no longer segregated, it is a visible marker of systemic racism that remains. One side of the wall has been painted with colorful murals for children; this side faces a spacious, well-maintained public playground. The other side of the wall remains barren and backs into a row of modest homes; an urban safety program has spray painted a phone number onto several boarded-up houses in the event that an owner might wish to reclaim it. The wall was built near 8 Mile Road, which later became the demarcation between an urban Black population inside the city and a suburban White population that moved outside its limits. In describing how a peak population of 1.8 million residents in the 1950s dwindled to approximately 700,000 residents by 2010, Thomas (2013) observes that the “lingering effects of racial antagonism and injustice are primary reasons that redevelopment failed to revitalize the modern city of Detroit” (p. 6). Some researchers identify Detroit and its exterior suburbs as the most segregated housing markets in the country (Logan & Stults, 2011; Vanhemert, 2013).

The photographic image in which “Black Detroit” converses with its suburban neighbors highlights these racial tensions. As the artist implies, the urban and the suburban each invoke fear in the other. Sugrue (2014) summarizes contemporary anxieties as such:

Suburban municipalities have no incentives to share tax revenue with the city; many view the city as a lost cause. Not surprisingly, Detroit’s black majority looks outward with distrust, fearful that regionalism would simply be another mechanism for suburban control. (p. xix)

Conversely, suburban areas resist urban control, particularly with regard to education. For instance, Milliken v. Bradley (1974) was a U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Detroit Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to advance a desegregation plan that would have incorporated 53 outlying suburban districts into the Detroit public school system. The suit failed. In a dissenting opinion, Thurgood Marshall noted that the inability to impose a multidistrict remedy may “allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black” (p. 815). Forty years later, scholars suggest that the outcome not only has had a continued negative impact on local schooling but also subsequently diminished the ability of other urban districts to effectively desegregate schools (see Green & Gooden, 2016).² For Khalifa, Douglas, and Chambers (2016), the resulting “resegregation of separate and inequitable schools” is colonial in nature.

It is within such contexts that street artists seek to “decolonize.”³ The message of decolonization in Detroit is inextricable from a lack of access to education, housing, transportation, employment, health care, child care, food, and even basic public services such as water (United Nations Human Rights, 2014). These daily injustices have been compounded by subprime mortgages that have accelerated the rate of foreclosures and abandonments across the city (Sugrue, 2014). As the city emerges from bankruptcy and the Great Recession, investors are purchasing buildings and redeveloping the broader downtown area. Consequently, longtime residents and business owners are questioning who benefits from redevelopment (Ferretti, 2016; Warikoo, 2015); the extent to they are included in the future of the city (Carlisle, 2016); and, given that only about 500 (of 3,000) home sales in 2015 involved mortgages (Helms, 2016), the ability of Detroiters to acquire financing to buy any one of the overwhelming number of homes that are listed at auction for US$1,000 or less.

As this unfolds, there has been an increase in the number of White residents moving into the city for the first time since the 1950s (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). Many accounts identify these new residents as members of a “creative class” (Conlin, 2015; Hill, 2014) whose presence is coveted by urban planners and business leaders alike, for an influx of “creative” residents would allow developers to re-imagine Detroit as a “haven for artists, cultural producers, and hipsters” (Sugrue, 2014, p. xxiii). As new residents begin to reclaim, gentrify, and recolonize historically desirable neighborhoods (Hill, 2014)—including those that are the primary focus of redevelopment efforts—their arrival ushers in new contests over the allocation of space and questions regarding who has the right to the city.

Street Art in and Against the Creative City

The battle over public creative space in Detroit has been more than a decade in the making. Following the fever pitch of The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002), which suggests that cities must compete for an emerging population of creative professionals to economically flourish, creative growth coalitions immediately began to develop plans for Detroit (see Clement & Kanai, 2015; Montgomery, 2015; Peck, 2011). As the historical heart of (a now defunct) auto-manufacturing industry, the municipality once known as “Motor City” had the potential not just to be a creative city, but, according to Florida at that time, perhaps even had more potential than any other city to be creative (in Peck, 2011). Stakeholders in Detroit were all in. Following the Great Recession, however, Florida (2009) later tempered his optimism and noted that “perhaps no other major city in the U.S. today looks more beleaguered than Detroit” (para. 36). The city did not change course. By continuing to follow the creative cities discourse and implement programs such as Murals in the Market, “Detroit has been consuming a transnational policy fix” and adhering to “the creativity script” (Peck, 2011, p. 63, emphasis in original). Because street art provides a trendy, recognizable urban accessory that extends into mainstream visual language (Chmielewska, 2007; Peck, 2011), it has neoliberal value as long as it is the “right” type of street art: invited and inviting, edgy yet polite.

The city has followed “the creativity script” to international acclaim. Detroit recently was recognized as an international Design City by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; 2015). UNESCO manages a Creative Cities Network, which, at the time of this writing, includes 116 cities in 54 countries that have been recognized for creative excellence in crafts and arts, design, film, gastronomy, literature, music, or media arts. Detroit is only one of six Design Cities in the world and is the first and only city in the United States to receive this distinction (Martin, 2015). Within the same year, Detroit also was recognized as one of the top 15 international arts cities (Artsy, 2015), as well as the third hottest food city in the country (Zagat, 2015).

For reasons such as these, many attribute the latest resurgence in the city to the arts and an influx of creative class residents into Detroit. This has created another fault line: “Move from Brooklyn to Detroit for the cheap rent: get applause. Spend years building your hometown’s arts community: get ignored” (Abbey-Lambertz, 2016, para. 1). In describing tensions between newcomers and longtime artists in the city (who work across a variety of artistic traditions), Abbey-Lambertz references Detroit artist and metalsmith Tiff Massey. Massey writes about gentrification in, “I see what you doin” (Massey, 2014), which has evolved into a digital track and performance video titled, “Detroit Is Black” (Massey, 2015). In these multi-media pieces, Massey problematizes how scarce municipal resources have been diverted from historically Black neighborhoods to instead improve areas gentrified by members of a less diverse creative class.

Creative cities such as Detroit thus offer new sets of challenges and opportunities for street artists. This raises questions regarding who decides what forms these paths should take and which artists are recognized along the way. Artistic conversations that mark sites of gentrification, describe the role of race in housing patterns, or call for decolonization are entangled in broader issues of democracy, justice, access, and recognition. As Montgomery (2015) observes, “Growth elites dominate the reinvention of Detroit because they command the funds to rebuild it” (p. 548). On one hand, the battle for public space continues. On the other hand, the street artists who work without permission are some of the very same artists who are being invited to contribute public art to revitalize and further the aims of this and other creative cities. Put differently, art may be a form of resistance, but it “can simultaneously become complicit with neoliberal globalization and the imperatives of contemporary urban development” (Lindner & Meissner, 2015, p. 5). This has allowed many street artists to work against the system while also furthering its aims.

Sometimes, this takes unusual turns in Detroit for artists who have been invited into the city to produce art. For example, Shepard Fairey was commissioned to paint a large, highly visible mural on a commercial building in downtown Detroit; soon thereafter, he was presented with felony charges for additional OBEY paste-ups that he allegedly placed in the city without permission during his stay, including—and especially—within the Eastern Market neighborhood (Vankin & Ng, 2015). The second image in the photographic cartography, located next to a security camera and facing his downtown mural, is one such example. Street artists protested his arrest by posting fliers in the area that read, “No to SPRAY unless you OBEY.” As the local media documented where Fairey supposedly placed additional art, some of the nearby “Bad Data” paste-ups were misattributed to Fairey.

In a different turn of events, visual artist Katherine Craig is now involved in a legal battle regarding her own artwork. She created The Illuminated Mural in 2009 by dripping more than 100 gallons of paint over the side of an empty nine-story building in the North End of Detroit; the landmark mural appears as if rainbows have slowly fallen down an oversized teal canvas. It brightens an otherwise bleak landscape. The building on which the mural appears has been purchased by a developer who intends to create lofts on the site; because it is unknown whether the building would be demolished or whether the mural otherwise would be affected (such as by cutting windows into the mural), Craig is seeking an injunction that would prevent the developer from altering or destroying the mural (Runyan, 2016); under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, artworks of “recognizable stature” are protected from destruction. This incident advances a different type of conflict over public space. In this case, Craig was invited to create artwork to enhance public visual space. Now that the building has increased in economic value, she is fighting to protect her own work.

The roles that artists play in protecting and contesting public visual space would benefit from further study, as would related aspects of methodology. It is with rare exception that forms of graffiti have been explored within qualitative research (e.g., Holmes, 2010). Moreover, the study of visual street art would benefit from imaginative critical inquiries of performance, politics, and theory (in Giardina & Denzin, 2011). Not only do leading street artists often situate their work within critical race theory and post-colonialism, for example, street art is performative and political in and of itself. Photographic cartography, especially when approached through a critical lens, offers a parallel means of analyzing politics through performance; further development of this methodology might continue to illustrate material-discursive fault lines. In sum, the arts are at the center of sophisticated artistic discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space within post-industrial “creative cities” such as Detroit. Consequently, researchers might continue to examine how urban street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.

Coda

Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesn’t this show that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order? The urban space of the street is a place . . . where speech becomes writing . . . and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe[s] itself on walls. (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 19, emphasis added)

A photographic cartography of one block, in one neighborhood, is but one of many visual fault lines within the city. This is a beginning, an opening, and perhaps, a larger project to come. It will be a project, however, that does not include the sign that sanctions street art.

It has been removed.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the numerous street artists in Detroit and elsewhere who inspired this writing (see Figures 3 and 4), as well as to the reviewers who helped strengthen this work. The author also thanks the doctoral students in her advanced ethnographic research seminar for their insightful comments on images collected for this study: Elsie Aquino, Karamjeet K. Dhillon, Jenn Layson, Nick Lenk, Therese M. Marz, and Henry J. Tyszka.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Jasmine B. Ulmer is an assistant professor of educational evaluation and research at Wayne State University. In addition to critical qualitative inquiry, her research interests include visual, digital, and spatial methodologies. She lives in Detroit.

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