What was lost after a Detroiter’s art database shut down

From street art to murals to sculptures, Detroit’s public art is everywhere on the internet — on social media , travel blogs and even the metro area’s tourism bureau .

But Detroiter Viranel Clerard, 30, was out there early, blogging and documenting public art around the city before many others. He started the website Detroit Mural Project in 2016. Clerard changed the site’s name to The Detroit Museum of Public Art when he began documenting more art styles. By 2020, it was all gone, before I even had a chance to see it.

I met Clerard in November when I asked to interview him about his work as a photographer. Instead, he told me the story of his old site: why he poured so much of his own time and money into it, why he gave up and some of the bitterness he still carries about this contribution being overlooked, despite the city becoming better known because of and through its public art.

“It was a public art project. It was such a cool website,” Clerard said. “I put everything into it. … No one (in Detroit) had this. It was unique.”

The Detroit Museum of Public Art cataloged thousands of pieces in all the city’s neighborhoods, Clerard claims. He took all the photos himself. Separating the pieces into categories by medium, he pinpointed the location of each piece with geographic coordinates. He also ranked artists based on who had produced the most art in the city. (At the time, it was Louise “Ouizi” Jones , a muralist)

Clerard said he pulled the site down in 2020 because he couldn’t afford to maintain it. It’s completely gone from the internet. An extensive public catalog of Detroit’s artistic history is now reduced to a few spreadsheets of the information that used to populate the site. Only Clerard can access the information.

Why document Detroit’s public art?

Clerard was born in New York but raised in Detroit before moving away when he was 19. He returned three years later, he said, in 2015.

“I wanted to be a part of the city and its come-up without taking anything from anyone that came before me,” Clerard said. “I wanted to be able to say I made a contribution and made my own lane that others in the future could jump to as a career that did not exist in this city before I created it.”

Archiving and documenting art existed long before Clerard. But his work creating a digital record was earlier and more comprehensive than many current efforts to catalog the city’s public art , though the vastness of the internet makes this kind of comparison difficult.

The site was simple in design: The homepage was a white screen that read “Detroit’s Public Art, Archived.” followed by the project’s mission statement and a button to enter the catalog. Each art entry had a photo of the piece, where it was, the artist who created it, the year it was created, who commissioned it and the City Council district where it was located.

Clerard said local artists like Ouizi and WC Bevan used the site to keep track of the locations. He also hoped schools and universities would use the site to teach children about Detroit’s art history.

“I felt confident that what I was creating was something that could give me purpose,” Clerard said.

He feels his self-funded efforts were overlooked at the time and that the city should have supported his work directly. After giving up his work on the site, he worked at Trader Joe’s and is pursuing an undergraduate degree at Wayne State University.

“It’s been (almost) a decade since I started the project. That’s (almost) a decade of history that I could’ve been documenting,” Clerard said.

Closing the site

Clerard had a full-time job, but he said he tried to also support himself while working on the site through donations and grants. He received a few, including a $1,000 grant from The Awesome Foundation . But the costs of commuting around the city to photograph the art and maintain the site started to add up.

“All my credit cards were maxed out, my credit is all messed up now … and no nonprofit wanted to work with me,” Clerard said.

Mayor Mike Duggan created the Office of Arts, Culture & Entrepreneurship (ACE) in 2019 and appointed former Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley as director. Clerard said he attempted to get the city to pay for the project before and after ACE was formed.

Clerard said he felt Riley, in particular, was dismissive of his work.

Riley called Clerard’s project “one of the most labor-intensive and well-done projects” she’s seen, but said she did not have the budget to hire him.

Clerard has a few backups of photos used in the project, but not all. Meanwhile, some of Clerard’s favorite pieces have since been partially covered, like Peter Daniel Bernal’s “Both Immigrant and Not” mural in Southwest Detroit; defaced, like a mural on West Warren Avenue by Jules Muck , known as Muckrock; or neglected, like the Merrill Fountain in Palmer Park.

Clerard is a little bitter about how his art project ended, but he doesn’t regret creating it. In hindsight, he said he wishes he would have focused on making the project an educational resource and expanding the project slowly, in a way that would’ve made operating the site manageable.

He hopes to bring the project back when he’s able to afford it.

“The thing is, I loved doing it,” Clerard said. “I really don’t know what exists and what doesn’t anymore. There’s murals and public art downtown now that I walk past, and, like, I should know who (did) that, and I don’t.”

Correction: A previous version of this article said Clerard cataloged artist Nancy Weezy Forman as having produced the most art in the city. It was Louise “Ouizi” Jones. We regret the error.

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