The Ann Arbor Graffiti Alley is Great Art… Until It Isn’t

Ann Arbor—Down East Liberty in Ann Arbor, past the Michigan Theater, there’s a darkened entryway, a portal between two parking structures. There’s colored paint all over the entrance, and it’s unclear what the space actually is, whether it’s public or private or if anyone maintains it at all.

It’s Ann Arbor’s Graffiti Alley, and at first glance it’s a genuinely interesting collaborative artwork—until it isn’t, and you realize it’s as shallow as the new bourgeois high rises around it.

The alley is rarely empty, just like the streets around it. That stretch of East Liberty and Washington streets is one of the busiest thoroughfares in Ann Arbor. The alley is a genuinely useful way to get between the two, without going all the way around the block.

It probably started that way, a convenient thoroughfare, hidden away. A few young people with cans of spray paint made their mark, and next thing you knew, it became the popular graffiti spot, and now it’s entirely covered.

Street performers and vagabonds often take up residence in the entryway, hawking their wares, playing music on bluetooth speakers, asking passerbys for donations. It’s sort of a lawless zone, an ambiguous space, and the graffiti certainly heightens that impression.

The graffiti itself, on first glance, actually presents a more visually impressive collective artwork than your typical spray-painted scrawlings. The colors are widely varied, enough where the overall color palette descends into a sort of Jackson Pollock-eque miasma, reminiscent of patterns you’d find in nature.

Graffiti is typically literary in nature, in the sense that it’s often composed of letter forms, words, names, creeds and such. Individual pieces of graffiti, by my estimation, are rarely beautiful. But stacking them upon each other for a few decades produces a sort of palimpsestic poetry, where individual meaning gives way to a stronger collective impulse, the simple urge to mark one’s presence.

That’s where graffiti is strongest as an art form, when it becomes more reminiscent of those ancient cave paintings of horses and hand prints. When it loses the ideological impulses of the moment and proclaims the more profound, more human urge to say “I was here.”

Where it loses steam, and where graffiti alley inevitably leaves you woefully bereft of substance, is when it descends into a war between competing phrases. Unfortunately, the more you look at Ann Arbor’s graffiti alley, the more you start to notice this.

“Fuck Trump. La migra es aqui. Open your mind. Renee Good. Holy cheeks. Abolish ICE. Egg salad. Revolution. Jesus is Lord. Good Job.”

The most recent works are the most prominent, as the graffiti is layered on. They stand out the most, so they’re what you see first when you start actually trying to read what’s written on the walls.

Without even rendering judgment on the phrases themselves, their cloying sincerity stands at odds with the beauty of the collective abstraction of color and form.

In visual art, it's important to have balance and tension between the two. Between abstraction and atmosphere and discrete meaning, between the more opaque forms and the more literal. The great artists master this balance, finding their ideal blending point along the spectrum between abstraction and representation.

Graffiti Alley gets close, but the recency bias is too strong. The newest, loudest screeds win and overwhelm the collective abstraction. The tension point is too heavily balanced towards the literal, towards the angriest, most political messages even, and the profundity of the space collapses like a lead balloon.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here in the nature of collectivism, and why it often undermines itself. It’s a lovely idea, a public space that all artists, any artists, can share to produce a collective artwork. The reality is, you lose any overall vision, the loudest and most recent voices dominate the tone, and the only significance that results is the fading beauty of cascading, overlapping, hidden layers.