On the east side of Detroit, in the McDougall-Hunt district, stretch four blocks of art formed from the detritus of a century’s worth of homes. There’s a chain-link fence strung up with crumbling shoes, an entire house studded with floppy, oversized stuffed animals, a field full of boards painted in a rainbow of colours to resemble clocks, a lone brick chimney crowned with a satellite dish, like an angel atop a Christmas tree. There are so many hills and piles and mountains shaped into sculptures from so many forgotten things that the sheer negative space feels like a silent ghost chorus. Here, in 1986, the artist Tyree Guyton began stitching together the Heidelberg Project from the leftovers of an abandoned neighbourhood – a protest against the city forsaking his people and his home.
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