THURSDAY, July 21 —- In a letter sent to candidates Aug. 2, Lansing City Clerk …
(Because of COVID’s impact on area theater during the 2021-’22 season, the …
Part 2 in next week’s City Pulse
No summer walk in downtown Lansing is complete without taking in the varied stimuli of Lansing ArtPath, a multi-media outdoor art display organized by the Lansing Art Gallery along three miles of the River Trail. The project stretches from the Turner-Dodge House through downtown and southeast to the I496 overpass. A diverse array of work by Michigan artists ranges from high-concept installations imbued with layers of artistic, cultural and historical meaning, such as Western Michigan University Professor William Charland’s “Red Outlines” to crazy stunts like a giant, dangling spider dangling over the Grand River by ScrapFest founder David Such and engineer Fred Hammond.
Benjamin Duke packs so much into his richly painted frescoes, they shouldn’t hang together.
Pink elephants with blue polka dots. Adorable young girls. Burning buildings and intrepid firefighters. Powder blue towers and rubber duckies.
Public art walks a thin line between sincere expression and feel-good space filler. What rescues “Looking Forward” from the latter category is that Duke knows exactly how to escort your eyeballs through the universe. A master of composition, color and form, he has taught painting and drawing at MSU since 2006, has done international residencies around the world and has had one-man shows in Chicago.
And he loves his work.
“I just love spray paint,” he said. “To watch the paint fly onto the wall is an engaging thing in its own right.”
Duke is the creator of one of ArtPath 2022’s most spectacular murals, “Looking Forward,” under the west end of the Shiawassee Street Bridge over the Grand River downtown.
The dominant figure, a young girl hefting a contented cat about half her size, is Duke’s own daughter.
Every time you walk by, you see something new — an octopus with pleading eyes, a textbook realistic heron, an intensely aware chicken, flowers that look like cookies.
You don’t have to know what it all “means” to enjoy the spectacle.
“My symbolic association is what’s driving me to make the work, but what I’m trying to create is an engaging image,” he said.
One of the interlocking stories that run through the mural is a story only a painter could tell.
“It’s how a series of reds fit together,” he said. “The elephant in the center is a big pink, maroon kind of elephant. The flower is this hot red, and then there are some really intense reds.” He pointed to a pair of jelly bean-ish blobs floating near the top. “Maybe they’re Chinese lanterns or they’re just circles of red that are floating in the sky.”
The point is not what they are, but that they are red.
Duke, 45, studied philosophy and literature at the University of Utah. His world was stretched by a two-month stint in Heidelberg, Germany, living with his father, who served in the military.
“I would just get on the train and go to the next place,” he said. “The thing about traveling around Europe is that the towns all point to a church or museum. Going around and seeing the art just blew my mind.”
Renaissance frescoes and canvases by the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael and Fra Angelico showed him how to fill a wall. Duke’s visual splendor harks all the way back to the splendiferous golden halos, crimson robes, ivory architecture and verdant trees that vie to upstage Jesus in Fra Angelico’s “Deposition of Christ.”
Duke studied painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and was hired by MSU in 2006. He plunged into the mural-verse while working with the city of East Lansing in 2016 to coordinate a series of public art projects, including a wraparound mural at the Division Street Parking Garage that’s still in progress.
“Mural work, image work at scale, is really compelling to me,” he said. “Think of the Duomo of Florence or any kind of cathedral. You’re immersed within an image. There’s this tension between the largeness of the thing and the representation of a thing.”
However, he finds mural work to be harder, mentally as well as physically, than sitting at an easel in his studio. Every little decision has big consequences.
“I have to think about the ambition of the image,” he said. “Can I get nine hours on the wall, eight hours? It’s the ambition of the image against how many cans of paint I have.”
Did someone say “ambition”? Duke has already moved on to a mural about 10 times bigger than “Moving Forward,” on the wall of a warehouse complex at the corner of Paulson Street and Turner Road, north of Old Town. At the center of the mural, now in progress, is a 30-foot-tall, time-and-space-compressing tree with the mottled trunk of a sycamore and half a dozen species of leaves, in both spring and autumn colors. There is snow and fire on that wall, and another mesmerizing young girl. Duke can talk all day about the myriad themes and techniques that feed into such a maximalist phantasmagoria, but he had a succinct summary for this one.
“It’s the everything tree,” he explained.
After five years of ArtPath, strollers on the Lansing River Trail may feel like they’ve seen it all, but they haven’t yet seen anything like this.
Drifting through a rectangle of creamy white paint, the strikingly beautiful profile of a Black woman in a yellow dress is graced with a gravity-defying, yellow floral crown. The plush pillow of petals billows in her wake, animated by an invisible solar wind under the Shiawassee Street Bridge.
“It’s another way to make you feel like you can be yourself, wear a crown,” artist Jamari Taylor said. “All of our crowns are different.”
The limited color palette of yellows and blacks is bold, yet easy on the eye. A smattering of gold leaf highlights the woman’s floral crown, throwing off mercurial, shifting glints as you walk by.
A recently acquired obsession with birds led Taylor, 45, to give a co-starring role in “Sunshine” to a great tit, a bird with matching yellow and black plumage and a hopeful symbolic significance.
“It worked beyond perfect,” she said. “Not just the color, but the meaning behind the great tit. If you’re taking a stroll under the Shiawassee Bridge, riding your bike, or even running, that portrait is meant to put you in a high spirits, keep your strength up.”
The painting’s positivity belies a serious setback that happened to Taylor late in May. She was well into work on the mural when a sudden shift in weather, from cold to hot, caused heavy condensation to form on the wall, before the paint had cured. The yellow paint in the floral crown ran down over the woman’s face.
“That was a nightmare — the first time I experienced something like that,” she said. “You could walk up to the wall and smear the paint off with your hands. I had to start over on all over again with it.”
A day later, conditions were dry again and she got back to work.
Taylor loved to create portraits as a youngster, but she didn’t have much confidence in her abilities until she took an art class and stuck with it in her senior year at Battle Creek Central High School, thanks largely to an encouraging teacher.
She was accepted into the illustration program at Grand Valley State University, got some experience as an illustrator and started a tutoring program in Battle Creek. She still works one-on-one with young students, teaching technique and building up their confidence.
“I treat it like an art therapy session,” she said. “They tell me what they love to do, what they want to learn, and in 10 weeks, I show them some different techniques and we just have a good time. I absolutely adore it and I hope to do it in other communities.”
She has been involved in pop-up shows and gallery exhibitions, but she always comes back to tutoring and mentoring.
“Some people say, ‘I can barely draw a stick figure.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, you can do more than that.’ It’s a mind thing, and it’s really awesome to teach.”
She has a few more murals in the works for summer and fall, including a project with students at the Dock Ministries in Grand Rapids and a mural that will become part of the Heartside Historic Murals in Grand Rapids, celebrating a historically Black neighborhood. Recently, she snagged a super-high-profile gig we can’t even announce yet.
On visits to Lansing, she’s enjoying positive feedback from passersby who appreciate “Sunshine.”
“I was hoping to bring peace of mind, a place where people can stop and find a space of healing and thought,” she said. “To slow down a little bit and soak in the art.”
David Such and Fred Hammond:
If you think the giant spider dangling from the Robert Busby Bridge over the Grand River in Old Town looks like something out of a 1950s horror movie, you’re right on target.
The artist-engineer team of David Such and Fred Hammond also created the giant, glowing eyeball on a stalk that goggled out from Elm Park for the 2019 ArtPath and now lurks behind Zoobie’s Old Town Tavern. It makes you wonder what else is skulking inside Such’s brain.
“I’ve seen my share of horror pictures,” Such admitted. “Every Saturday, me and my brothers and sisters would go to the movies in downtown Lansing.”
Before Such, 69, lived in Lansing, he spent Saturday nights watching Flint horror-movie host Christopher Coffin.
Such, the founder of Lansing ScrapFest, and Hammond have already made a few marks on Greater Lansing.
They created the bike chain sculpture in front of Chipotle’s in East Lansing and the diving bell-gong apparatus that occupied the Elm Park spot on ArtPath in 2018. Last year, they completed “Encompass Lansing,” an elaborate, walk-through sculpture fabricated from laser-cut metal and concrete at the corner of Pleasant Grove and Holmes roads.
The two have talked for years about doing a sculpture that interacts with the Grand River.
Hammond suggested they hang something over the river, relishing the engineering challenge. The River Trail boardwalk under Cesar Chavez Avenue is already festooned with active and abandoned webs of hundreds of spiders.
“A spider seemed like a natural fit there,” Such said.
The legs are made of PVC piping with elbow joints, wrapped in insulation to give them girth and texture. The body is made of several layers of 3-inch-thick hard insulation, shaped with a hot knife and glued together. The 4-inch-wide glassy red eyes were an online purchase.
He ordered green ones, but red ones arrived by mistake, and Such is glad of it.
“They are really scary,” he said.
Hammond, the crack engineer of the duo, inserted a metal rod, to which all the arthropod’s pods are securely screwed.
Installation was complicated. First, Such and Hammond had to show Lansing city engineer Dean Johnson the project would not harm the bridge.
They ruled out using a boat to install the spider because the nearest boat launch upstream from the North Lansing dam is miles away, in Dimondale.
Although the spider only weighs 32 pounds, it took six people to lift it into place from the River Trail boardwalk. The arachnid had to be hung more than 20 feet away from the boardwalk, so the torque (weight times distance) involved in the lift was man-killing. Hammond devised a hanging lift system, using three wooden planks and a rope sling.
“We just swung it out there,” Such said. “The hook system Fred developed allowed us to get it out, just a little bit above where the bar it hangs on, and then we kind of just dropped it there. I’m telling you, Fred’s a genius when it comes to this stuff.”
(Such spoke for both men, describing Hammond as “camera shy.”)
When Such returned to the site to look at the spider recently, he was greeted with a tableau straight out of Christopher Coffin’s TV horror show.
“It’s got spiders growing on it,” Such said with a grin. “They’re making webs between the legs.”
No matter how far you step away from “One Wish,” a colorful matrix of dots under the east abutment of the Shiawassee Street Bridge, it refuses to resolve into a single image.
That’s because the dots aren’t pixels, in the TV or comic book sense. The trick is to move closer, not farther away.
Each dot contains an image of a piece of origami paper folded into an elegant crane.
Lansing-based illustrator Marissa Tawney Thaler was inspired by the story of Sodako Sasaki, who suffered from leukemia after surviving the Hiroshima bomb. According to Japanese legend, the gods grant a wish to any person who folds 1,000 paper cranes. Thaler was inspired by a semi-fictionalized version of the story, often taught in schools, in which Sodako folded as many as she could before her strength gave out, and her classmates folded the rest for her. (In real life, Sodako exceeded the goal of 1,000 on her own.)
Unfortunately, working on the mural was not as meditative as folding 1,000 paper cranes.
“It was an act of diligence and grit,” she said. Un-productive thoughts such as “that’s 431 dots down, 569 to go” were rigorously banished.
“The whole time, I battled this feeling of the piece being way too big for me,” she said. “As long as I kept my head down and stayed focused on the section in front of me, I kept myself from getting overwhelmed.”
The work sequence required her to start all over, from Dot One, three times. First, she carefully stenciled outlines of all the dots. Next, she painted all of them in a pleasing color progression, to add movement to the mural and “get your eyes to move around.”
Finally, she created linoleum block stamps depicting six variants of the cranes and printed them inside the circles, directly on the wall.
“It was a challenge to stay in a place where I felt on top of it, but it was exciting toward the end, when it finally came together,” she said.
To complicate the process, on the third day of work, in late May, the weather turned from chilly to hot. The paint Thaler used on the chilly day didn’t cure and ran down the wall in a slurry of condensed moisture.
“It was intense,” Thaler said.
Thaler got a text that morning from Jamari Taylor, who was painting “Sunshine,” the mural next to hers: “Our murals are ruined.”
“It stayed wet all day, so there was nothing we could do,” Thaler said. The next day, the air was dry enough to patch up the white spaces and remix and match the colors to repaint the dots.
Thaler was thankful that the mural’s design, although intricate, is not technically sophisticated.
“I kept thinking, it was circles and white spaces, just hard work, and if there’s anything I know I can do, it’s hard work, so this is OK.”
Thaler, 36, learned to draw in college, later in life than many artists, and she got used to working harder than her classmates to stay in the game. She studied art education and illustration at Kendall College of Art and Design. After graduating, she taught art in elementary school for 10 years, until 2018, when she decided to pursue a career as a freelance illustrator.
“I’ve always been drawn to line quality,” she said. “In a room full of paintings, I will always find the drawing, because I love the heart in drawing.”
She has illustrated two children’s books, “Get that GRIT!” and “The Itchy Secret,” working from a sunlit studio above a plant shop in DeWitt. Recently, she has expressed a newfound interest in murals, not only in the ArtPath project, but in various spots around town, including the children’s section of the Hooked bookstore and wine shop in East Lansing and another mural outside her sunny DeWitt studio.
“Get that grit” is an apt formula for mural painting, especially in urban hangouts like the plaza under the bridge where Thaler painted “One Wish.”
Among the curious onlookers were an opossum and a rat.
“It was so much dirtier process than I thought it would be, working outside, in the dirt and pigeon gunk,” she said. “I felt like a trash Disney princess.”
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I’ve been writing for City Pulse since the paper started — more than 17 years. I was brought on board to write about music, but the job quickly got out of hand. By now I’ve written about everything from ants to skyscrapers and met more fascinating and wonderful people than I can count.
You can reach Lawrence at: Lawrence@lansingcitypulse.com or (517) 999-5065