Tyree Guyton

Honorary Director, Heidelberg Project Board of Directors

Founding Artist, The Heidelberg Project

Tyree Guyton (b. 1955) was born and raised in Detroit on the street that gives its name to his most famous work - the Heidelberg Project. Though Guyton was introduced to art as a child by his grandfather, his spent his early years in the US Army.  After returning home Guyton went to work in the automobile industry for Ford Motor and later Chrysler where he was also a member of the UAW.  Guyton ended up as a firefighter finally realizing that his true calling was to an artist.  He trained for two years at the Center for Creative Studies but eventually dropped out after being told he did not fit in.  In 1986 Guyton began to chart his own path with the creation of the Heidelberg Project on Heidelberg Street in Detroit.

 An essential component of Guyton’s work is his commitment to social change, and he has leveraged his art on Heidelberg Street to redress the inequities caused by racism, economic imbalances, politics, and the systematic inability of the government and other support agencies to help Detroit’s poorest citizens.   Thirty years later, the Heidelberg Project is a Detroit Landmark.  It is internationally recognized as a demonstration of the power of the human spirit and the resilience of the city of Detroit. 

 However during the evolution of the Heidelberg Project, Guyton never left his studio practice.  He has been creating art for over 45 years.  Guyton’s receives commissions from around the world and his work is collected nationally and internationally, and is featured in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University Of Michigan Museum Of Art, the Perez Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem and many others. He has earned over eighteen awards and fellowships, including a prestigious one-year residency at the Lorenz Haus in Basel, Switzerland.  Guyton is the focus of many scholarly journals and books in both the United States and Europe, and a book dedicated solely to his work, Connecting the Dots: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (Wayne State University Press, 2007) is still widely collected. He is currently at work on a dissertation, 2+2=8: A Philosophy by Tyree Guyton.  In 2009, the College of Creative Studies awarded Guyton an honorary Doctor of Fine Art and in 2016, the Ecumenical Theological Seminary awarded Guyton with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, the first ever given to an artist.