In the heart of Detroit’s East Canfield neighborhood, a colorful new structure has been taking shape with a hidden purpose.
At 4405 Lemay St., directly across from Barack Obama Leadership Academy, sunshine-colored rods intricately crisscross and fuse over one another to resemble a patterned, flowery gateway. Upon closer inspection, a solar panel sits and a light shines above the arch, from the center of the flower’s stigma.
The structure is not just an art installation, or even an urban renewal project; instead, it stands as a testament to the power of art to address injustice and catalyze the move from ruin to revitalization.
The most recent installation in the East Canfield Art Park and the first piece of the Detroit Remediation Forest, Jordan Weber’s “New Forest, Ancient Thrones” is a large-scale, interactive sculpture with real use: it’s equipped with an air quality monitor to assess the air pollution released by the car-manufacturing Stellantis’ Mack Assembly Plant just a mile away.
Air quality at stake
Since November 2021, the plant has been fined eight times for air quality violations. In March, the plant agreed to pay an $84,000 fine issued by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy for exceeding the limit for volatile organic compounds (VOC) at its Jefferson North Assembly Plant, which is also located in the East Canfield neighborhood. VOC vapors can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches and other side effects, and other air pollutants exacerbate and potentially cause asthma symptoms.
The monitor on Weber’s piece is one of a hundred scattered across Wayne County, all part of an air quality monitoring network by Detroit-based environmental tech company JustAir. Residents in East Canfield and Wayne County can access updated air quality data at justair.app or sign up with a phone number to receive text alerts when the air quality is poor.
More about the monitors: Air quality monitors installed across Detroit, Wayne County (freep.com)
For East Canfield residents who might not have access to electronic devices or internet, the lightbulb in the center of the golden sculpture emits a colorful glow corresponding to the air quality index (AQI), ranging from green for “good” to maroon for “hazardous.” Ahead of the sculpture’s finalization, kindergarten through eighth grade students across the street were taught how to interpret the visual readouts to distinguish between good and bad air quality days.
The sculpture’s completion also marks the end of Phase 1 of Weber’s “Detroit Remediation Forest,” an installation to mitigate the environmental challenges caused by the Stellantis’ Plant. Phase 2, expected to be unveiled in 2025, will redevelop the 10 acres of overgrowth and illegal dumping behind the art park into a community gathering space and elevated walkway surrounded by “air-scrubbing trees” to clean the air of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter — and other pollutants.
Colin Massa, a fabricator on the sculpture and local artist who lives seven blocks away in the neighborhood, commented: “I just hope there’s some real benefit that comes out on the other side: awareness of the air quality or in honor of people who are trying to do work in the neighborhood. Anybody who knows what’s going on with the project, the first thing they say is ‘air quality.’ That’s the point. … I can’t speak for the artist, but (having put in) my energy, that makes it worthwhile to me.”
Another unique sculpture in Detroit:Sculpture made of sticks taking shape in northwest Detroit (freep.com)
A positive message
Beyond its practical function, “New Forest, Ancient Thrones” serves as an appropriate focal point for the East Canfield Art Park, which addresses injustice and negative stigmas with positive images of the Black community.
The park, which opened in 2021, was created by Canfield Consortium, a local nonprofit started by two sisters who grew up in East Canfield trying to revitalize the neighborhood they once knew.
“A lot of the times when people think about community development, especially in under-resourced and under-served neighborhoods, it’s all about putting Band-Aids on poverty and not really uplifting or investing,” said Kim Theus, co-founder of Canfield Consortium. “It’s the difference between spending and investing, and when you look at art, it’s always an investment.”
Raised just a couple of blocks from where the art park now sits, Kim and Rhonda Theus’ parents left the South and moved into a house in East Canfield in 1967, during the Jim Crow era, and stayed until they died in 2006. After their parents’ passing, the sisters planned to sell the house, but after witnessing the disrepair, depopulation and mass demolition that nearly destroyed their childhood neighborhood, they decided to stay and work to redevelop the community.
The sisters founded Canfield Consortium in 2015 and moved back into their parents’ home in 2016.
“The majority of people who live here are like me, who could live in a lot better neighborhoods, but we choose to stay here because we live in homes that were passed down from great-grandparents, grandparents, or parents that have a legacy, so we deserve to have a nice community,” said Rhonda Theus. “We asked, ‘What’s the city’s plan?’ And we were shocked that they didn’t have one, so that’s kind of how our work was born. … We just saw a need and decided to fill it to honor not only our family but the families of other people and the people who live here.”
Their first project was transforming a vacant lot into a small community flower garden, which they expanded once Canfield Consortium received more grants. A current work-in-progress is their East Canfield Innovation Hub, an indoor gathering space adjacent to the garden for the community to come together, whether it be for business or social events. Instead of building from scratch, the sisters purchased a house listed for demolition and fixed it up with new windows and new roof, alongside an event lawn.
“We wanted to get it off the demolition list to show people in the city and the neighborhood what could be done with these structures,” said Rhonda Theus. “We have to hold on to the history of this community, we can’t just tear everything down.”
Looking ahead, the sisters want to continue working with vacant structures, primarily rehabbing houses so that people who might not otherwise have the chance can become homeowners without worrying about renovation expenses.
Much of their efforts in recent years have been poured into transforming an overgrown lot into the East Canfield Art Park, keeping the students coming out of Barack Obama Leadership Academy at the forefront of their creative process. The sisters were influenced by the knowledge that children would pass by the park every day during their most impressionable years, shaping the park’s design and the choice of pieces to include.
The park’s first piece, “Boy Holds Flower” by Austen Brantley, was commissioned by Canfield Consortium as a symbol of Black boys’ and men’s beauty and vulnerability, and it was installed in 2021. The park also contains an art display to house pieces on a rotating basis, and currently displays “Hood Closed” by Elonte Davis, “At Peace” by Terry Childres and “Saturday Night Hymns” by Miriam Hull.
“It’s important in Black communities that they see positive images of themselves … these powerful, beautiful images of themselves,” said Rhonda Theus. “That’s the type of impact we want to have, to build on the legacy that we talked about earlier to build on that and create the type of community that everybody wants.”
‘Hood closed to gentrifiers’
While it’s sparked some discourse in the community, a particular sign created by Bryce Detroit that reads “Hood closed to gentrifiers” stands at the front corner of the art park — an embodiment of Canfield Consortium’s mission.
“I don’t think people really understand gentrification. … For us, it’s about people and communities having the opportunity to redevelop it, not having outsiders come in and then push them out,” said Kim Theus. “We’ve had some very lively conversations with residents and other people, just going into a deeper conversation of what gentrification really means. … ‘Do you want someone else to come in and change the whole feel of the neighborhood, or would you like us as a community to work with people to tell them what it is that we need?'”
It’s also the idea that inspired Weber’s “New Forest, Ancient Thrones” piece.
While it may require an informed eye to see past the petal shapes, the sculpture is actually the combination of two crowns worn by two African queens who fought against the diaspora: Queen Idia of Benin and Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar.
The combination of the two crowns is a tribute to the two women leading the redevelopment of the East Canfield community, says Weber, helping Black Americans keep their homes when environmental and systemic racism may be pushing them out to gentrify their neighborhoods.
More:How Wayne County became dumping ground for dangerous chemicals (freep.com)
“(The sculpture) is the visual identifier of all the work Kim and Rhonda have been doing. … I feel like that’s synonymous with what Queen Ranavalona III was doing in Madagascar, trying to fend off French colonization,” said Weber. “It’s a really strong, symbolic, on-the-nose representation of the African diasporic experience and the trauma that’s in the land in both Africa and the U.S., and what is continually scraped off our backs.
“Queen Ranavalona III was exiled from Madagascar and forced to live in Europe for the remainder of her life, and that’s no different to me. … It’s the same mechanism of colonization tactics, so I’m trying to draw that line through earth projects and remediation projects because I think that fight is one and the same: social justice and environmental justice,” the artist said.
“I love the fact that art can make challenging subjects more palatable, because first, visually, you’re taking in what you’re seeing and that I think makes your psyche a little more open to accepting some harder truths,” said Kim Theus. “Jordan’s sculpture is like that iron fist in a velvet glove where you see the beauty, now let’s talk about what’s really happening.”
Previous reporting by Amelia Benavides-Colon contributed to this story.
