Contemporary art company 1XRUN is expanding its annual murals festival east with its new Murals in Islandview event.
The new project comes as 1XRUN realized the need for more public art in the Islandview neighborhood, where it relocated its headquarters to in 2018. It previously called Eastern Market home, where it had developed the popular Murals in the Market festival that has filled the district with dozens of murals from artists from all over.
1XRUN, along with the Detroit artists chosen for Murals in Islandview, gathered at its gallery and cafe Spot Lite on Thursday to discuss the changes.
For the first time ever, the festival will be able to pay all of the artists participating, which organizers say will be the standard practice moving forward.
“It’s really necessary and essential,” says India Solomon, an abstract visual artist involved in this year’s event. “We all have different roles in the community, so if you see this as our profession and the way we show up in the world, it feels good to be compensated.”
While Solomon has been involved in Detroit’s art community for a few years, this is her first time officially being a part of the 1XRUN festival. To her, murals are a “beautiful combination” of community building, developing spaces, and allowing artists to grow their artistic practice.
“We’re all on either side of the process, whether it’s through making it or having the impact,” Solomon adds. “The important thing here is serving that role of beautifying environments that have not received that attention.”
The Murals in the Market festival began in 2015, and expanded with the Small Business Mural Project in 2017 to create murals beyond the Eastern Market.
Murals in Islandview continues 1xRUN’s goal to represent a diverse array of artists. Besides Solomon, the new festival will feature some of Detroit’s hottest artists, including Rick Williams, Sheefy McFly, Tony Whlgn, Ivan Montoya, and many more.
Murals in Islandview will launch on Tuesday, Sept. 26, offering more than a dozen activations throughout the week, ending on a high note with an official closing party for Design Core’s Month of Design. The block party finale is helping to fund the festival, which is also supported by sponsors DTE, The Gilbert Family Foundation and ITC, Downtown Boxing Gym, and Paxahau.
The festival is free to the public, and all programming will be held at Spot Lite.
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