Above and Beyond
PAINTING MOTOWN’S STARS WITH LOVE AND HOPE
This September, giant images of Diana Ross were due to be projected onto monuments and buildings in major cities around the world. It was part of Decca Records’ campaign to promote the release of her new album, Thank You.
Ross’ hometown was among those chosen to experience the artwork at maximum scale – perhaps not too far from where another famous Michigander smiles high above its streets.
A grateful Diana, soon to be on a building near you
It was two years ago that Richard Wilson, a Londoner, painted a giant mural of Stevie Wonder on a wall of Detroit’s Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts. The portrait is approximately 100 feet tall, and sufficiently large (covering some 10,000 square feet) to be seen from high above. “It’s a listed building,” Wilson told me last month, “and the mural should be there forever.”
Supersize images of the stars of Motown are evidently a thing. Around the time that the Wonder wall was completed, the residents of Austin, Texas could cast their gaze onto a large mural of the company’s most celebrated singers and musicians. That was the work of local artist Chris Rogers, who was commissioned by the city’s LBJ Presidential Library when it hosted a travelling exhibit, Motown: The Sound of Young America, during 2019.
Meanwhile, a wall-size painting of Diana Ross is currently on display in Nashville to help promote The Wayback Party Bar, due to open this summer. It was done by Stephen Sloan, based on one of photographer Harry Langdon’s striking mid-1970s portraits of the star. Another Ross mural can be found in the city, too, being the work of Charles Key, inspired by one of her Supremes images.
Several thousand miles away, a mural of Marvin Gaye was unveiled in London recently to mark the 50th anniversary of his own monument, What’s Going On. It was painted by local artist Dreph, who added motifs and imagery about the climate crisis, gender inequality and world peace to the 16-foot-square portrayal of Gaye.
Richard Wilson’s Wonder wall in Detroit
The work was commissioned by Universal Music (Motown’s owner) in the U.K., and is located in the heart of London’s Brixton district. That has its own historic legacy as the site of dramatic clashes between citizens and police in 1981, the type of racial conflict alluded to in Gaye’s album. “The painting for me is a recognition of today,” said Dreph, “with hope for a better tomorrow.”
The Stevie Wonder mural in Detroit has already yielded a better tomorrow, at least for Richard Wilson. “While painting the wall, I met a girl and we got married later that year,” he explains. “Now I’m just about to relocate to Detroit after finally getting my visa, after being apart from each other for around 16 months.”
The Briton’s first work in the Motor City was for the Murals in the Market street art festival. “I’d been painting or drawing some musical heroes of mine from the world of house music – artists like Louie Vega, Josh Milan, Peven Everett and others.” Wilson believes that Murals in the Market co-founder Roula David first saw his work online, “and felt that I’d be a good fit to come and paint. So they got me out there in 2018. Prior to that, I had no connection to Detroit apart from just owning records where I would read ‘Made in Detroit’ on them.”
Subsequently, Wilson pitched the idea of the Wonder mural to Vince Paul, president and artistic director of the city’s Music Hall Center. “He just arrived on our doorstep one day,” Paul told the Detroit Free Press. Wonder is evidently a hero of Wilson’s. “Not just his musical genius,” he says, “but his humanity. I hope the wall speaks about more than his music, it speaks about love.”
Chris Rogers’ Motown mural at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas (photo: Jay Godwin)
Music aside, it was snapper Doug Kirkland’s ’70s photographs which helped to inspire the painter. “There’s an image of [Wonder] a little younger than in the Kirkland image, playing the harmonica, that I really love. But the Kirkland image just captured Stevie so wonderfully for me. I’m a little vintage-equipment nerd, so wanted to make sure to include other musical icons like the Fender Rhodes and the Hohner D6, which Stevie did use extensively, of course.”
The mural took more than a couple of months and $10,000 to complete, including the cost of Wilson’s accommodation while in Detroit, and the 100 gallons of exterior house paint, sourced locally. “Weather-wise, it’s possible that in some decades it will lose some colour,” he says. However, his relocation to Detroit means that if it does ever need a touch-up, “I’ll be local to take care of it.”
Marvin Gaye in Brixton, with mural painter Dreph
Is Wonder himself aware of the mural? “I’m not totally sure,” replies Wilson. “I believe when I completed it, some of his band members were at the Music Hall for a show, and I heard whisperings that they told him about it. I hope he would like it, and the sentiment of what I was trying to convey to him, from us. I really felt that the world should be so grateful to him.”
Naturally, Wonder was portrayed in the mural at Austin’s LBJ Presidential Library – which attracts visitors from around the world – when the Motown exhibit was staged there. He was also included in another piece of wide-horizon artwork created in Detroit in 2013 by local artist Clifton Perry. The site of the latter’s painting was itself a piece of history: the Northland Center in suburban Southfield, Michigan, otherwise known for being the site of the United States’ first shopping mall, built in 1954. Perry’s mural was 16 feet tall and 45 feet wide on a wall where the J.C. Penney department store had been located. It featured images of ten Motown acts, from Smokey Robinson to Rick James, as well as Berry Gordy and his sister, Esther Edwards. When the mall closed in 2015, Perry hoped his work might find a new home, but it was not to be, despite a GoFundMe campaign with that goal. However, he has continued to paint on walls large and small, with his work displayed via Detroit’s Murals in the Market.
Several years ago, Chris Rogers, the Texas-based artist responsible for the mural at the LBJ library, painted famous African-Americans, including Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross, on the lobby wall of a church in Round Rock, near Austin. When the library decided to celebrate Motown’s 60th anniversary, he was contacted – and completed the piece in nine days.
Diana Ross in Nashville, waiting for the bar to open
“A Dare to Dream,” as Rogers’ mural was called, drew from familiar images of Motown’s household names, but also six of its studio players (as captured in the iconic Joe Hunter Band photo) and five earlier music giants who had helped clear the path for Berry Gordy’s stars: Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King.
Also in 2019, Detroit artist Ndubisi Okoye painted a series of murals at the worldwide headquarters of the Universal Music Group in Los Angeles, including one depicting the Hitsville hitmakers. “It is a visual love letter to the time of their dominance and to the city that made their artists icons,” Okoye wrote recently. “At the bottom of the main mural, the message is ‘The legendary Motown, Thank You, Berry Gordy!’ in hand-lettering.”
He used the colour palette from a series of old Motown vinyl records. “I filled the abstract pieces with references to things that made Motown iconic: music, film, and artist development – the different flowers, or stars, that are blooming.” Among the singers portrayed were Wonder, Gaye, Robinson and Ross.
Given Motown’s cultural and socio-political stature in American history, there is bound to be more larger-than-life imagery created in future. On a more modest scale, you can certainly find original paintings and portraits, such as this Marvin Gaye offering (even as a jigsaw puzzle) or this Motown impression (in four sizes).
Perhaps the forthcoming presence of Diana Ross on buildings around the world will inspire others to pick up a paintbrush and find an inviting space to use it. Hey, look where it led Richard Wilson. “I met my wife at the actual wall,” he says. You could call that higher ground.
Clifton Perry’s Motown mural at the former Northland Center in Southfield, Michigan