To understand the work of Sydney G. James, the Black figurative painter and public art muralist, renowned for painting loud and large, you must first hear these words: “I want you to see me.’’
Of course, the casual eye would have to look and look again to fully decode the me embedded in James’ declaration. She is in fact paying homage to the strength of the people and the place that made her: the D, the city known to the rest of the world as Detroit.
Whether painting on canvas, board, clothing or the brick walls at mural festivals from Miami to Ghana, James is almost always channeling home. A moment in her presence and you know: “I’m from Detroit. That’s where I draw all of my inspiration from.’’ Her embodiment is often head-to-toe. Note the neon Olde English D that usually dangles from her ears in self-portraits and in real life; Sydney G. James is one with Detroit, and Detroit’s buildings are covered with the unmistakable hues of her love.
That love, unapologetically Black, sits at the center of her popularity in public art. The rich brushstrokes and lifelike details in James’ art have catapulted her into a local legend. Here are three pivotal pieces to see in Detroit.
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1. A Monument to Malice
In 2020, James repurposed a brutal chapter in Detroit’s history by honoring the life of Malice Green and more than a 1,000 other Black and Brown people who lost their lives to police violence.
James’ mural, which is actually in Highland Park, a small neighboring community bordering Detroit, features a massive portrait of Green holding a seemingly unending scroll of names of people slain by police as he was in 1992, by two white Detroit police officers. James’ vision, large and stark, routinely halts traffic. The mural, created with a select team, was completed in just five days. The art, and scale, are wrenching. So is this less visible detail: James purposefully had her team begin the mural’s roll call of death starting the year she was born in 1979 through to 2020. And still, “painting all of these names, didn’t even put a dent in the many names of Black people.’’
Still of “A Monument to Malice” from “Sydney G. James: How We See Us,” directed by Juanita Anderson.
Sydney G. James’ creative career started in 2001 as a fresh-out-of-college advertising art director. In 2004, she moved a world away to work in Los Angeles as a visual artist in film and television. Until she heard home calling. From the moment she returned, James, an artist since kindergarten, found an unending rise. Museum curators and gallerists have made Black art collectors salivate over her equally large paintings and graphite drawings as well. They typically sell swiftly, increasingly in the four to five-figure price range.
James centers Detroit as a muse, not because she’s self-absorbed or impervious to the wonders of the rest of the world – she wants others to feel some of the fire that fuels and convinces her that art can indeed rebut lingering race-based hatred of her city, her people, and their often-imitated-but-rarely-duplicated creative hustle. “Our culture, our history; it’s something really special, different. We’re vibrant and strong.’’
All across Detroit, James’ public murals are towering explosions of color and community. First sketched, then painstakingly painted straight from the heart of an artist intent on shouting to the world, “We’re not going anywhere.’’
James’ passion for scale, pride of place and vibrancy lend a level of pageantry to the people she paints, as if her paint brushes were mystically dipped in the raw realities and resilience of her subjects, and by extension that of American Black culture. She pointedly interrogates and flat-out flips longstanding social tropes and Black stereotypes: “I want my art to start conversations, to spark change.’’
2. Girl with the D Earring
Sydney G. James’ 8,000 sq. ft. mural “Girl with the D Earring” (2020). Photo by Lamar Landers.
The largest James mural to-date looks out over Detroit from nine stories above one of the city’s most iconic streets, Grand Boulevard, a street made famous by the architect Albert Kahn and Motown founder Berry Gordy. While the buildings designed by Kahn and Gordy’s legendary Hitsville U.S.A recording studio continue to draw tourists to the Boulevard, it’s James’ mural that Detroiters are most proud to claim. The mural features a single subject looming, sentry-like, above the skyline.
The mural is in fact a reimagining of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s famous work, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.’’ In James’ version of the painting, the “girl” is an 8,000-square-foot Black woman propped alone against a jet-black brick wall. Her gaze is that of a guardian and her hair is covered in a radiant, almost royal, flowing head-wrap. She is real, a fellow well-known artist and activist, whose life James likens to art.
This is classic Sydney G. James, boldly and slyly rebuking the cultural invisibility of Black women, her favorite muse second to Detroit. The connection, James has said of her choice to center Black women, is soul-deep.
“I once saw a woman who looked like a god sitting at a light holding a sign of need and thought to myself, ‘My God; we are even regal in our despair.’ I can still see her and often think of that thought when I look at Black women.’’
3. BLKOut Walls & Beyond
Sydney G. James in downtown Detroit, photo by Lamar Landers.
In each city that James’ either chooses to or is invited to make a new public work, her art stands out. Don’t ask her to recount how many cities and countries she’s worked in; the list is beyond her. Still, it is Detroit that consistently reflects back the impact and importance of becoming a Black woman artist. “Some people paint flowers, I don’t,’’ she says. “I paint real people, Black people, for a reason. We need to see us.’’
In 2021, James co-founded the traveling mural festival, BLKOut Walls, which started, of course, in Detroit. Over the course of seven days, the city’s North End neighborhood became a living public arts canvas. The festival is returning to Detroit this September just as James will close out her upcoming stint, beginning in April, as the first Black woman artist to have a solo exhibition in the coveted, and expansive, main gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Like many of the subjects that populate James’ paintings and murals, the exhibition will celebrate a cast of similarly dedicated Detroiters, friends and generations of family.
To see even just one of Sydney James’ artworks — the electric colors, bold lifelike and knowing gazes, on sprawling walls and canvases – is to witness an artist, much like her signature “Girl with the D” mural, enlarged with purpose.
“When the truth is in your face and it’s large and unafraid; you have to see it,’’ says James. “No matter what the world says; I want people to look at my art and see the truth of us. We’re beautiful.’’
