For the past two decades, Corrine Stocker has been greeted by the color beige as she pulls into work each morning. While there’s nothing wrong with the color beige per se, the pale yellowish-brown of such a neutral shade does little to stir the imagination. And that’s a shame because it’s imagination that is alive most of all inside those beige-bricked walls of Stocker’s workplace: the Hazel Park Memorial District Library.

As an adult services librarian in her first decade here and as Library Director for the past ten years and counting, Stocker has daydreamed about a public art project livening up the library’s exterior for many of those 20 years. But combine the dogged determination of a Hazel Park Library board member with a world-class art museum, add in public input from the Hazel Park community itself, and apply the talents of a Detroit-based artist whose skills and drive have taken him to far reaching locales such as Taiwan and back – well, you get the picture.

Or mural, for that matter.



Detroit artist Zach Curtis started and completed his latest mural over the course of several days this past September, a public artwork that stretches across the most prominent of the Hazel Park Library’s brick walls. The wall is angled toward the intersection of John R and 9 Mile roads, and the vibrant colors sprayed from Curtis’s aerosol paint cans have enlivened the city’s center with a scene that complements what’s happening both inside and outside those formerly beige library walls.

“Now, after 20 years of beige, I really look forward to approaching the library,” Stocker says. “I see (the mural) and it just makes me happy. I see so many kids standing there and looking at it, or riding their bikes back and forth to check it out.”

Past, present, and future

Hazel Park’s new mural was funded with a $25,000 grant from the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) through its Partners in Public Art (PIPA) program. The DIA launched PIPA in 2018, partnering with select cities in Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties to install community-minded public art projects each year.

There’s a spirited competition among metro Detroit communities vying to be accepted into the program, which grants only a few murals each year. Barbara Winter, who serves on the Hazel Park District Library board, has been applying for the program ever since its launch in 2018. When the library found out that it had been accepted earlier this year, community outreach by way of a public survey commenced. The DIA requires that PIPA recipients reach out to their communities in determining just what it is that the mural will express, and library staff distributed a survey asking residents what themes that they’d like to see in the new mural.

“Themes that occurred most frequently were ‘children,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘the library,’ ‘education,’ and ‘past, present, and future.’ So those are the themes that (the artist) tried to incorporate,” Stocker says. “And I think he did a marvelous job.”



Zach Curtis is the artist in question, a self-taught muralist who sticks to aerosol cans of spray paint when working on his murals. Curtis lives nearby in Detroit, though he’s often traveling to paint a new mural at various points throughout North America and well beyond. He estimates he’s been commissioned to paint somewhere between 250 to 300 murals since he started doing this seven years ago. Earlier this year, Curtis collaborated with an artist friend, the California-based Karen Chen, on a new mural in Taiwan. When completed, the 13-story mural became the biggest mural in the entire country.

 

 

 

 

 

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For all his accomplishments and travels, Curtis says that collaborating with the DIA on their Hazel Park project is not only a career highlight but the culmination of something even bigger.

“Working with the DIA is one of the top goals you can reach as an artist. It was always a dream to work with them,” he says. “And now I guess my next dream is to eventually one day have a painting in the DIA.”

'A bit of magic'

After library staff passed the community survey results to the DIA and Zach Curtis, a draft was approved and Curtis set to work in September. The result incorporates the most common submitted themes to feature two children reading a book as racehorses run out of the pages. A World War II era plane carries a Hazel Park banner. And there’s color. Lots and lots of color that has transformed the entire intersection with a blast of vibrancy.

And it’s an important intersection. Hazel Park’s library is situated in the center of the city and within a municipal campus that also includes City Hall, Police Department, and the 43rd District Court. The two main buildings would open at the northwestern corner of John R and 9 Mile roads in 1970. The highly visible library wall facing the intersection is now awash in purples and blues and pinks, drawing the attention and delight of passers-by.

“I think the biggest thing that stands out for me is that it’s just so bright, it’s so attention-grabbing. It’s just a great way to enter into a city,” Curtis says. “If you’ve never visited Hazel Park before, what a great way to be greeted into the community. It’s the placement of it, the colors, how it pops out at you.”



The library has received an overwhelmingly positive response since the mural’s completion, Stocker says, from visitors to residents to those locally employed. But it’s the children’s reactions that she enjoys seeing most. It catches the eye, and theirs most of all.

“I think they see themselves in it,” Stocker says. “It's just a bit of magic, and it really lifts up the library and the city in general.”

Hazel Park Memorial District Library is located at 123 E 9 Mile Rd. in Hazel Park.