100th Mural in Detroit Painted By Local Artist
The city of Detroit has official reached 100 murals painted. To celebrate this mile stone, the City Walls initiative will unveil its 100th mural on the city’s east side. The City Walls program was initially started in 2017.Its mission was to transform graffiti-covered/ vacant building walls with beautiful murals. Since it began, City Walls has invested more than $500,000 in the Detroit art community and over 60 artists have completed 100 murals throughout metro Detroit. Art work from these artist now cover more than 150,000 square feet of the city’s walls. The artist who painted the 100th mural, which is painted on the side of a storage building on Mack and Van Dyke, was pained by local Detroit artist Waleed Johnson.
Johnson, a native of Detroit’s eastside, has been drawing since he was a child, however developed his painted skills at the University of Notre Dame. Johnson said, “I’ve seen some murals when I was younger, and I didn’t know how much they impacted me until some of them were torn down and what’s cool to me is like this could potentially do the same thing for another kid.” Johnson’s mural is a picture of an African American woman wearing the City of Detroit flag and holding the gold sun as if she were the living Spirt of Detroit. Johnson drew inspiration for the mural over four years ago when he took a portrait of his friend. He then began exploring the idea with his fiancé to make a mural about the celebration of black women.
Detroit, make sure to check out this beautiful masterpiece as we celebrated our 100 murals in Detroit.
