Overflowing Parking

Blue Sky, American, born 1938

Overflowing Parking, 1978 and 2019

Being considered one of the most iconic murals in Flint, “Overflowing Parking” was originally painted on the old Flint Journal building by Blue Sky in 1978. Sky was fascinated by the cars in Flint and the beauty of parking lots. He described cars as the jewels of the land, with “different color, sparkling in the sun.” Due to the fragile nature of the original surface, the mural started to peel off only a few years after being done. The restoration was done by Stephen Heddy, of Artistic Decorating, a Flint-local interior design company. The restoration stirred up an intense discussion around the city. People would come by to talk to Heddy about the restoration and express their impatience for this Flint icon to come back to life. Label by Yifei He

Flint Fresh

Nomad Clan, British

Kevin Burdick, American, born 1985

This piece was commissioned by the Flint Public Art Project, partnering with Flint Fresh, an organization that runs eleven food hubs to act as a local kind of grocery store for the people of Genesee County. It is Flint Fresh who hosts the mural within one of their hubs. Nomad Clan are a duo of street artists that have been involved in several social justice projects, and Kevin Burdick is a Flint native experienced in multiple mediums of art. The piece itself shows a quintessential cornucopia of produce accompanied by the words “Flint Fresh”, and so on one level it is a kind of advertisement for Flint Fresh. On another level this piece speaks to showing how Flint is a “fresh”  and healthy city, not just in spite of disasters like lead-poisoned drinking water, but because of the activist’s drive for local self-determination in the face of such disasters as is also represented by Flint Fresh’s goal of forming a local network between farmers, distributors, and the people of Flint. Label by Frank Kennedy

Lead Exposure Series

Gretchen Pruett, American, born 1987

Lead Exposure Series, 2016

Gretchen Pruett’s watercolor paintings were a part of an exhibit at the Buckham Gallery, which featured local artists from Flint, Michigan, and their artistic expressions surrounding the water crisis. The Buckham Gallery is a non-profit organization that supports the local art community in Flint. Pruett’s paintings feature images of body parts that have been affected by the lead in the local water. As a model for the images, she used original medical imaging from residents, and her backlit watercolor paintings are realistic expressions of this imaging. The main purpose of choosing such a subject was to bring awareness to the dangerous side effects residents have suffered from the lead poisoned water and demonstrating how critical it is that Flint residents have access to stronger medical relief and protection. Label by Maeve Marsh

The Red Tulips

Dustin Hall, American, born 1999

The Red Tulips, 2018

In this painting, Hall uses abstraction and color blocking to create an anthropomorphized landscape of queer figures. Painted on the back of a scavenged cardboard poster frame and hung with scrap wire, the painting contains two separate blocks of color, the upper block in yellow and the lower block in green. Within in each block, spirals of other colors swirl to create forms suggestive of penises, vaginas, breasts, and faces. Uniting and blurring the boundaries between the two blocks are three distinct, humanlike figures in white, black, and gray. The bodies which appear in the middle, with their combination of female and male primary and secondary sex characteristics, do not fit cisnormative understandings of biological femininity and masculinity. Just as the figures blur between the landscape and each other, so too do they blur between binary constructions of sex and gender. The abstraction of the lines in the lower half of the painting further enables this sexual and gender ambiguity. Phallic forms whirl into yonic forms which then whirl into breasts and faces and hands until each form is simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, disrupting biological binaries of sex and gender (as well as binaries separating humans and nature) to the point where such binaries become incomprehensible. The figure in the center of the painting grounds this chaos, signaling that an alternative to shaky models of binary gender resides in the transcendence of this binary in favor of a body that recognizes the fluidity of gender and sexual categories. Label by Maxwell Cloe