'Mural hunters' will track, map Detroit's outdoor artworks in app, online registry

Duante Beddingfield, Detroit Free Press

May 11, 2022 at 5:27 PM·3 min read

Detroit artist Sydney G. James with her mural "The Girl with the D Earring" that is painted on the Chroma building in Detroit.

Detroit’s office of Arts, Culture & Entrepreneurship (Detroit ACE) announced Wednesday it is partnering with CANVS, an art technology company, to identify all the outdoor art on city walls.

ACE Director Rochelle Riley announced the initiative during a news conference in front of Chroma, a co-working office space in the Milwaukee Junction neighborhood. The CANVS collaboration, which involves an iPhone application and an online map, is part of Mayor Mike Duggan’s “Blight to Beauty” campaign promoting public art.

Riley declared the upcoming season “the summer of Detroit murals,” and said ACE will begin enlisting “mural hunters,” an army of supporters who will help enter murals into the registry.

To better connect residents to murals, CANVS will create a digital map on the ACE webpage that will allow users to create tours of similar murals, or find murals they have seen, but do not remember where.

The city of Detroit’s office of Arts, Culture & Entrepreneurship (Detroit ACE) announced Wednesday it is partnering with CANVS, an art technology company, to identify all the art on the city’s walls. A screenshot from the CANVS app demonstrates its capabilities for Detroit.

Lorren Cargill, co-founder of the startup, said one of his company’s missions is to better connect community to art.

“When art becomes more accessible, it allows people to better connect with the city,” he said. “'The Girl with the D Earring' — people know that now. We’re all a part of that context-setting. Once people find the murals and learn about the artists, they’re able to connect with different parts of the city and know Detroit’s artists.”

Cargill said he visited the North End neighborhood, where CANVS loaded the murals from “Girl with the D Earring” artist Sydney James’ BlkOutWalls Festival.

“I had a good time there with all those murals,” he said. “That place is in my mind now. I have stories there. I met people who live there. Street art allows you do that across Detroit.”

The CANVS initiative is cosponsored by the Ford Foundation. Riley and her team were joined in the announcement by Tashif Turner (aka Sheefy McFly); Ralph Andre, co-founder of CANVS; Sam Coons, ACE’s program manager for neighborhood arts development, and Zachary Meers, director of Detroit’s City Walls fellowship program, which hires artists to do specific murals and recently completed its 100th mural.

More: Coalition plans 4-day commemoration in June to honor Asian American civil rights legacy

More: Edsel and Eleanor Ford Ford House to host outdoor painting event with prizes

Launched in 2016 as a passion project, the CANVS Street Art app has expanded to over 100 cities, with more than 2,000 murals aggregated. Andre said the interactive map is “coming really, really soon.”

The platform itself is currently downloadable for iOS users, with an Android version being fast-tracked for availability, Andre said.

“Street art is everywhere; it's ambiguous,” he said. “Everyone sees it, everyone sees the beautiful art, but the stories behind the murals, the artists who create them, almost always go unknown. The inspiration for creating this app was for me to support my artist friends and create this widespread documentation of street art.

"When street art is present in a city, it’s always the prelude to greater creative growth … driving this creative economy.”

Ralph Andre, founder of the CANVS Street Art app, speaks at a May 11, 2022 news conference about cataloguing Detroit's murals in the app.

Andre emphasized the importance of the "mural hunters" in the effort to collect and catalogue all of the city's murals within the app.

"Mural hunters … literally go to different cities and capture murals," he said. "They tag the artists, they provide all the contextual information. With this mural hunter initiative, we are actively calling all the photographers, all the art enthusiasts of Detroit to grab their cameras, capture murals, and document them, upload them to the CANVS platform, the upcoming mural map of Detroit. Again, we are documenting the history of street art, past and present, across Detroit."

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit, CANVS to track murals in iPhone app, online registry

Reuters
Exclusive-Huawei aims to mass-produce newest AI chip in early 2025, despite US curbs
China's Huawei plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence chip in the first quarter of 2025, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to U.S. restrictions, said two people familiar with the matter. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C - its newest chip, meant to rival those made by U.S. AI chipmaker Nvidia - to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. Huawei is at the heart of U.S.-China friction over trade and security.
Associated Press
Rain and snow pummel Northern California in latest wave of damaging weather to strike West Coast
A major storm pummeled Northern California with rain and snow on Wednesday night and threatened to cause flash flooding and rockslides in the latest wave of damaging weather to wash over the West Coast. The National Weather Service extended a flood watch into Saturday for areas north of San Francisco as the strongest atmospheric river — a large plume of moisture flowing onshore — that California and the Pacific Northwest has seen this season inundated the region. The storm system unleashed winds the night before that left two people dead and hundreds of thousands without power in Washington state.
Time
Why the U.S. Launched an International Network of AI Safety Institutes
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo emphasized the importance of integrating security with innovation when it comes to something as rapidly advancing and as powerful as artificial intelligence.
AFP
World still split over money as clock ticks on COP29
A fresh draft deal published Thursday at the deadlocked COP29 climate talks shows rich and poor countries still divided as time runs out to strike a finance agreement for developing nations.The draft reflects the broad and opposing positions of developed countries -- which are obligated to pay climate finance -- and the developing countries that receive it.
AFP
India's Adani Enterprises tanks after founder's US charges
Shares in India's Adani Enterprises slumped 20 percent at Thursday's open after US prosecutors charged billionaire industrialist founder Gautam Adani with paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and hiding the payments from investors.Founder Gautam and two other board members are accused in the indictment of orchestrating "an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars", US attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
AFP
Swiss region to vote on cost of 'blasphemous' Eurovision 2025
Basel voters will decide Sunday on whether to spend tens of millions of dollars to host the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, with opponents decrying a "waste" of public funds for a "blasphemous" music performance. He slammed "blasphemic performances", some verging on "the occult", decrying that this year's performance by Irish artist Bambie Thug as "almost a public form of Black Mass".
Associated Press
North Korea and Russia agree to expand their economic cooperation
North Korea and Russia reached a new agreement for expanding economic cooperation following high-level talks in Pyongyang this week, the North’s state media said Thursday, as they continue to align in the face of their confrontations with Washington. The Russian news agency Tass on Tuesday said officials following an earlier round of talks agreed to increase the number of charter flights between the countries to promote tourism.
Associated Press
At UN climate talks, a draft of the deal gives little clarity on climate cash for developing nations
A new draft text released early Thursday which will form the basis of any deal reached at United Nations climate talks on money for developing countries to transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change left out a crucial sticking point: how much wealthy nations will pay. Negotiators at the talks — known as COP29 — in Baku, Azerbaijan, are trying to close the gap between the $1.3 trillion the developing world says is needed in climate finance and the few hundred billion that richer nations have been prepared to pay.
Associated Press
Southeast Asian defense chiefs discuss regional security with US, China and other partner nations
Southeast Asian defense chiefs met Thursday with China, the United States and other partner nations in Laos for security talks, which come as Beijing’s increasingly assertive stance in its claim to most of the South China Sea is leading to more confrontations. The closed-door talks put U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun in the same room a day after Dong refused a request to meet with Austin one-on-one on the sidelines of the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meetings.
Reuters
BOJ Ueda says will 'seriously' take into account FX impact on economy, prices
Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda said on Thursday the central bank will "seriously" take into account foreign exchange-rate moves in compiling its economic and price forecasts. On monetary policy, Ueda reiterated that the BOJ will reach a decision "meeting by meeting" on the basis of information that becomes available. There is still a month to go until the BOJ's next policy meeting in December, he noted, adding that there will be more information to digest by then.
Associated Press
Alabama to use nitrogen gas to execute man for 1994 slaying of hitchhiker
An Alabama prisoner convicted of the 1994 murder of a female hitchhiker is slated Thursday to become the third person executed by nitrogen gas. Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was one of four teenagers convicted of killing Vickie Deblieux, 37, who was hitchhiking through Alabama on her way to her mother’s home in Louisiana. Alabama this year began using nitrogen gas to carry out some death sentences, the first use of a new execution method in the United States since lethal injection was introduced in 1982.
Associated Press
Why people are protesting over a deadly roof collapse in Serbia
The deadly collapse of a concrete roof at a rail station in Serbia has raised tensions across the Balkan county, fueling widespread anger toward the government and protests after the failure claimed 15 lives in the northern city of Novi Sad. Officials have offered conflicting information about whether the roof was part of the renovation, and its maintenance is under scrutiny. The collapse became a flashpoint for broader dissatisfaction with Serbia's authoritarian rule, reflecting growing public demands for transparency while the country undertakes large infrastructure projects, mostly with Chinese state companies. What do we know about the collapse?
Associated Press
At UN climate talks, "sewage" beer from Singapore highlights water scarcity and innovations
In the sprawling pavilion section of the United Nations climate talks, where countries, nonprofits and tech companies use big, flashy signs to get the attention of the thousands of people walking through, small aqua and purple beverage cans sit conspicuously on a counter at the Singapore display. “I can even suggest that they make more and more of this kind of beer,” added Mbouamboua with a smile, sharing it was his third day in a row he stopped for a can. NEWBrew is made in Singapore with NEWater, the name of treated wastewater that's part of a national campaign to conserve every drop in one of the world’s most water-starved places.
CNN
Indian international students in the US outnumber Chinese for the first time in 15 years
For more than a decade, Chinese students have flocked to the United States, drawn by the prestige of an overseas education and the glamor of the American Dream. But that’s changing now – and recent statistics suggest the allure may be wearing off.
Associated Press
Papuan women's mangrove forest in Indonesia is increasingly threatened by development and pollution
On the southeastern coast of the city of Jayapura, Petronela Merauje walked from house to house in her floating village inviting women to join her the next morning in the surrounding mangrove forests. Merauje and the women of her village, Enggros, practice the tradition of Tonotwiyat, which literally means "working in the forest." For six generations, women from the 700-strong Papuan population there have worked among the mangroves collecting clams, fishing and gathering firewood.
Associated Press
Volcano on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula erupts for the 7th time in a year
It was its seventh eruption since December. Iceland’s meteorological office that monitors seismic activity said Wednesday’s eruption occurred at 11:14 p.m. creating a fissure around 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) long, but estimated the eruption is considerable smaller than the previous eruption in August.
Associated Press
Trump's incoming chief of staff is a former lobbyist. She'll face a raft of special interests
As incoming White House chief of staff, one of Susie Wiles ’ vexing challenges will be policing the buffet line of powerful interests who want something from Donald Trump. During Trump’s first presidency, she lobbied for many of them. Trump was first elected on a pledge to “drain the swamp” in Washington.
CNN
Vance debuts new role as Trump’s point person on Capitol Hill
After rarely being seen in public in the two weeks since he delivered a brief, 46-second victory speech on election night, JD Vance reemerged this week to play one of the most important roles he will be expected to fill as Donald Trump’s No. 2: His point person on Capitol Hill.
CNN
‘It’s impossible to breathe’: Life in the world’s most polluted city
Inside Delhi’s first ever clinic dedicated to pollution-related illnesses, Deepak Rajak struggles to catch his breath.
CNN
Laken Riley’s killer sentenced to life in prison after heart-wrenching pleas from her family
A man accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley while she was out for a run earlier this year was found guilty Wednesday and sentenced to life without parole in a case that reignited the national debate over immigration and crime.

Latest Stories