Projection Mapping Proposal
Created for the City of Grand Rapids
Hello!
Thanks for taking the time to review my application for the Motu Viget "Strength In Activity" show.
I am a full-time traveling muralist with a home base in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For 2022's ArtPrize, I won first place in the Juried Vote for a monumental lakeshore ecology-themed mural. I've also been selected for several national mural festivals, National Parks grants, international airports, city-wide Historic Preservation Initiatives, over a dozen murals across Michigan, and murals in 8 states.
In addition to mural work, I am an active community organizer. I currently organize Grand Rapids' Heartside Historic Mural Festival (an anti-gentrification effort), and am the founder of the ongoing Pleasant Peninsula Festival (a fest dedicated to furthering environmental education through public art).
I am particularly passionate about public art's radical accessibility, its employment in combatting gentrification, and its ability to raise awareness of environmental and social issues.
Please find below examples of my research process. I've included projects created for the City of Petoskey and a recent research-based mural themed around the history of transportation in Grand Rapids.
Thanks for your time & consideration!
Maddie
TRAVELERS
Footpaths, waterways, railroads, and the people who navigated them.
A NOTE ON MY PROCESS
My murals are all deeply informed by place; the culture of a city, the surrounding ecosystems, the geologic history of the land, and the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. I believe that murals should honor the location in which they're made, rather than glorifying the artists who made them. For this reason, my work requires in-depth research; both academic and in the field.
Every element of the following designs has been intentionally selected to tell a scientifically and culturally accurate story.
The following research comes from time spent at the Field Museum in Chicago, conversations with Ojibwe colleagues, documents from the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and one incredible evening on Lake Michigan looking for Petoskey Stones with professional rock hounds.
Thanks for indulging me in sharing what I've learned!
Travelers!
80' x 50'
Grand Rapids, MI
2024
The theme of this mural, selected over the last 3 years of the Heartside Project, is “Transportation in Grand Rapids”. “Oh no,” said I over a year ago, “this is going to be so boring. This is going to look like little boy pajamas.” But with the guidance of local historians, the GR Public Museum, the Women’s History Council, the GR Public Library, first hand accounts, and lots of niche hyper-local history books, I came to realize that transportation is not just cars and stop signs and school buses. It’s the means by which we move throughout, toward, and from the place we come home. This is not a mural about trains and canoes, but about the people who navigated them.
Part 1 — Footpaths, Waterways, and Yakin’ the River
The mural (which progresses chronologically from left to right) kicks off with the first documented inhabitants of the Grand River area; the Hopewell People. The Hopewell are famous for their monumental earthwork mounds. During archeological surveys, objects like copper from the Upper Peninsula, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and even shark teeth from the Atlantic Ocean have been discovered in the mounds, indicating a vast and advanced trade network. Over 2,000 years ago, the Hopewell were traversing the entirety of the midwest through waterways and footpaths, making them the first prolific travelers of these lands.
Over 800 years ago, the People of the Three Fires became the dominant cultural group of the area. These Anishinaabek peoples navigated the waters of the Owashtanong (the Grand River) and the Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin (the Great Lakes) using birchbark canoes. These wiigwaasi-jiimaanan (birchbark canoes) are incredibly advanced, durable, and a testament to the technological and artistic achievements of the Anishinaabek. Despite the attempted eradication of Indigenous culture by European colonizers, the art form of the wiigwaas jimaan persists to this day thanks to the dedication of remaining canoe builders, one of whom is depicted in the top left corner of the mural.
As a part of my research for this period of transportation history, I kayaked the Grand River from the Hopewell Mounds (at the west end of Millennium Park) to Lake Michigan! Along the way I met a few migratory species like steelhead trout and Canada geese, who represent migration as another form of transportation in the mural.
Part 2 — Clear Cutting, Fur Trade, and Hartwick Pines
As Europeans began to colonize the area in the 1800s, the ecology of the Owashtanong was thrown out of balance. The fur trade and lumber industries were the primary culprits of this shift. Beavers, which had been harvested sustainably by the Aniishinaabe for centuries, experienced a dramatic population dip. The white pine, which once forested almost the entire state of Michigan, were clear cut. The introduction of the steamboat onto the Grand River in 1830 played an important role in accelerating the impact of these industries. The Governor Mason was the first steamship on the Grand, and is illustrated in the mural.
Birch bark can be harvested by an experienced canoe builder without damaging the tree. The birch will grow its bark again and yield several more harvests. In contrast, the white pines of the area were logged entirely without thought to the future of the species. The shortsightedness of this practice changed the composition of our forests entirely.
The difference in attitude between the Anishinaabe’s sustainable harvests and the French’s exploitative clear cutting is alluded to again in the clothing of the two large figures of the mural: the Ojibwe woman paddling the canoe wears a dress beaded with porcupine quills. Quills could be collected without harming the porcupine. The Frenchman driving the lumber cart, on the other hand, wears a beaver pelt suit. Several beavers would be killed for the production of a suit of this kind.
In order to better understand the history of logging in our state, I hitched it up to Hartwick Pines, one of the very few remaining old growth forests in Michigan. Even there, on the protected parcel of unlogged land, the forest is imbalanced due to human activity. When Hartwick Pines was gifted by a private owner to the state, it was under the condition that it may never be touched again. These turned out to be bad instructions, because it resulted in the repression of fire in the area. The white pines in Hartwick Pines, some of the oldest remaining in all of Michigan, will die without regenerating because their seeds cannot reach the soil; it’s too covered in unburned, uncleared detritus. When the pines die of old age, hardwoods will take over the area and the white pine forests of the Lower Peninsula will be lost to history.
Part 3 — Railways, Streetcars, and the Speed of Progress
Although water travel had been the only means of transportation in the Grand River area for thousands of years, the expansion of the railroad network in the 1860s led to the decline of steamboat transport on the Grand River. Railroads offered faster, more reliable, and year-round service, unaffected by the river's seasonal variations. The railroads connected Grand Rapids to the rest of the nation and ushered in an era of increased immigration, trade, and development.
By the end of the 19th century, electric streetcars had become established pillars of city infrastructure well. However, this would turn out to be a relatively short-lived endeavor; automobiles were growing in popularity. When the Great Depression hit, the city determined that it was more economically feasible to transition to busing than to maintain the streetcar lines, making Grand Rapids the second city in the nation to transition fully to automobiles. At this point in the mural, you’ll see depicted the 6 Cherry Streetcar, which ran up and down Cherry Street right next to the mural’s location today. There’s also a woman riding one of them big wheel Penny Farthing bikes, which references the Women’s Bicycle Club of this time period.
To capture the overall essence of this time in Grand Rapids history, I included two peregrine falcons. Before colonization, peregrine falcons would have been a coastal species, nesting in bluffs along the lakeshore. Urbanization led to the construction of high rise environments perfect for falcons, which were likely introduced to the area by Europeans practicing falconry. The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird on earth, which represents the unrelenting speed of technological “progress.” Their carnivorous nature represents the consumption of resources necessary to maintain this breakneck speed.
