Four-foot panels Detroiters painted by hand, then assembled into one 32-foot wall.
Most murals arrive finished. An artist gets a wall, a lift, and a few weeks, and the neighborhood watches it appear. Brontae Williamson did the opposite. She designed the picture, then broke it into sixteen numbered panels and handed the brushes to whoever showed up.
Williamson is a multidisciplinary designer with a product design degree from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. When the Detroit Historical Society put out an open call for a mural at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, she submitted a piece called Currents in Color, built around the diversity between people and the natural world and a Detroiter's plain love for how the city looks. The Society picked it out of the field.
The format is the story. Currents in Color was translated into a 32 by 8-foot horizontal mural made of sixteen four-foot square panels, done in paint-by-number style. Through the summer, residents came out to The Strand on Belle Isle and filled in the numbers themselves. This week the finished panels were assembled and hung on the west wall of the museum, where they will stay.
A wall a hundred strangers painted by hand is not decoration. It is a receipt.
There is a Detroit fact buried in the method, too. Paint-by-number was developed here, by Dan Robbins at a Detroit paint company, and it was built on a genuinely radical idea for its time. Anyone can make a real painting if you break it into steps small enough to start. Williamson took a novelty most people file under kitsch and used it to do something serious, which is put a professional-grade public artwork in the hands of people who would never call themselves artists.
That choice changes who the wall belongs to. A commissioned mural belongs to the artist and the institution that paid for it. This one belongs to everyone who put a brush to a panel and can now walk their kids past it and point. Williamson kept the authorship of the design and gave away the authorship of the labor, and that trade is the whole move.
This is the ANF Take. The easiest thing a talented designer can do is make the beautiful thing alone and sign it. The harder, better thing is to design a structure other people can build inside, and then actually let them. Williamson did the second one. She turned a personal design into a public act, and the community did not just get to look at the result. They made it.
Detroit has never been short on talent that leaves. It has been short on talent that stays and builds where other people can reach it. A CCS grad who could take her portfolio anywhere instead put a wall on Belle Isle that the whole city literally had a hand in. That is the near future we keep pointing at. Not the genius in the studio. The builder who leaves the door open.
