The Murals of Downtown Flint

The Murals of Downtown Flint

Flint has become filled with public art in the form of murals. These murals celebrate Flint’s past, its people, and its future and have become attractions for tourists and locals alike to visit in the city. Since the beginning of the project in 2017, the Flint murals have come to represent the re-birth of the city as once bare or graffitied walls are now covered in breathtaking art that serves as constant inspiration.

The murals themselves were born out of a desire to bring beauty and a voice to Flint after the water crisis.

When local writer and multimedia producer Jessica Revoldt learned that a group of activist artists from California wanted to highlight what was happening in the city, she reached out to facilitate connections. The group, known collectively as Indecline, would need places to stay and spaces to paint. Revoldt volunteered to host the artists in her home and helped connect them to the Flint Public Art Project (FPAP) and its former director, Joe Schipani. Schipani then reached out to the Genesee County Land Bank and local businesses for space for these artists to paint on.   

“This project escalated to other local businesses saying ‘hey, I want a mural on the side of my building’,” says Revoldt.

One of Indecline’s most famous works, “Greetings from Flint,” which depicted the faces of the water crisis. This and other work from that time opened the door to what became the FPAP’s mural project in the city.

“The mural project started in 2017 after having conversations with the neighborhoods,” Schipani says. “They felt that their hard work was being overshadowed by the water crisis and shows like ‘Flint Town’ that focused on the bight and hardship of the city. One of the goals of the project was to connect the neighborhood business centers with the downtown, getting people to explore areas of the city that they didn’t often go to, to see the great work happening to improve the whole city.”

This work was a rousing success. Over the coming years, the mural project grew exponentially, attracting artists from not only the region but from the entire country. As the city saw how well the project was going, demand rose. More and more murals were commissioned, filling the city with art. The mural project has brought life to spaces where there was only a blank wall or a forgotten building and has reminded the city of its beauty. Indecline returned to the city twice more to do further murals, and that mural work inspired one of their friends to want to visit Flint and make a movie here – the film “Half-Dead Fred.”

The murals of Flint show the power of public art and are a testament to what can be done when the community comes together to work on a project. While some of the original murals may be gone, the legacy of the project and the murals that remain are a reminder of the power of art.

Head into Flint and take a tour of the nearly 350 murals found throughout the city of Flint with the help of this map that can help guide you to several of them. For more information about the Flint Public Art Project you can head to their website: https://flintpublicartproject.com/