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Update: Sunday, 6:45 p.m. -- Artist Ryan Mendoza flew in from Berlin to hold a press conference and celebration at the home he deconstructed. The gathering including singing and speakers from the neighborhood and relatives of Rosa Parks. Parks lived at the home for a couple years in the late 1950s. Above is an interview Deadline Detroit's Allan Lengel conducted with Mendoza.
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Original Story from Saturday Night
Artist Ryan Mendoza, who has a fascination with vacant Detroit homes and art, is at it again.
Ryan Mendoza
You might recall that the American-born Mendoza, who lives in Berlin, grabbed headlines when he deconstructed a vacant Detroit home last year and shipped it to Europe, only to put back together, paint it white and turn it into an art project. Earlier this year, he did something creative with two vacant homes in Detroit's Brighmoor neighborhood, spelling out “Clinton” on one and “Trump” on another. LED lights spell out the names at night.
Now, this.
In the summer, Mendoza quietly desconstructed a three-bedroom home at 2672 S. Deacon Street in southwest Detroit where civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived. He then shipped it to Berlin, where he plans to put it back together and display it at museums around Europe. Eventually, he says, he hopes the home returns to its rightful place, Detroit.
"This is probably the most important project I’ll every be involved in in my life," Mendoza tells Deadline Detroit in a phone interview from Berlin.
"This is not just a Detroit story," he says. "Rosa Parks is bigger than Detroit. She is absolutely important on an international level. Everyone I speak to in Europe knows about the Rosa Parks story." Parks died in 2005 at age 92.
Rhea McCauley, Rosa Park's niece and president of the Rosa Parks Family Foundation, says she was only a few years old, living in the Deacon Street home with 12 other siblings and her parents, when aunt Rosa Parks, her husband Raymond Parks and Rosa's mother, Leona, moved from Alabama into the house.
It was 1957 and they stayed there for about two years before getting their own home, McCauley says.
"The house is part of history," McCauley, 65, of Ann Arbor, tells Deadline Detroit.
The vacant house landed on the city's demolition list.
McCauley says she paid $500 of her own money to the Detroit Land Bank Authority to take it off the list. She then tried to find an organizations to preserve it.
She says she went to such organization as the NAACP and Motor City Blight Busters, but had no luck. That's when she turned Mendoza, who took up the cause.
"The purpose of the family foundation is to assure that the house will be restored," she says. "I am protecting and prolonging her legacy."
On Sunday at 4 p.m. at the home at 2672 S. Deacon Street, Mendoza, who flew to Detroit for the weekend, will hold a press conference to discuss the project. On Monday, a contractor paid for by Mendoza, will remove the remaining debris on the property.
"I'm very pleased that Ryan offered to take the home," says McCauley.
