Gift (or get) an original piece of power line-inspired art by Hamtramck-based artist Marcus Merritt
Welcome to the holiday season! We hope you’ll consider a green approach by gifting (or getting) a special piece of art from a local artist. The first 50 people to sign up to give (or get) a new recurring monthly personal or gift Planet Detroit membership will receive one 8 x 10 print of an original power line drawing print signed by Hamtramck-based artist Marcus Merritt. Scroll down to learn more about the artist and his work. Choose from among these options:
| GET A GIFT Sponsor $15/month Sustainer $10/month Friend $5/month | GIVE A GIFT Gift Sponsor $15/month Gift Sustainer $10/month Gift Friend $5/month |
Artist’s statement:
I started the Power Lines Drawing series in the summer of 2020, looking for an artistic practice to direct my attention more closely to the world immediately around me. The drawings are of power line formations I come across on walks and bike rides around Detroit and Hamtramck. A person could imagine similar messes of lines, but part of the point for me is that the complexity of these formations often surprises me more than anything I’d come up with on my own. In that sense, the drawings are like meditations, each line carefully observed and translated from actual poles and power lines into a silhouette, straddling the line between figurative and abstract. Around Detroit, we see the remnants of an infrastructure built up to accommodate a much denser city that, over the years, has been patched together and hastily fixed just enough to string things along a little more.
The power lines in my drawings often reflect that, makeshift and messy, at once beautiful in their complexity and clearly not how things were supposed to end up. As I continue the project, the drawings become an archive of just how this part of the built environment looked at this moment in time, a portrait of one aspect of Detroit.
Marcus Merritt, November 2023