Ryan Patrick Hooper

Special to the Detroit Free Press

A 45-year-old piece of public art is going from faded to full color in downtown Detroit.

On the east-facing side of the Detroit Foundation Hotel at 234 W. Larned, artists Hubert Massey, 60, and Henry Heading, 61, are bringing back to life the work of a legendary Detroit artist over three decades their senior — 94-year-old Charles McGee.

McGee’s untitled geometric mural was finished in 1974 but has been slowly disappearing into the brick it was painted on. The design was once a vivid, minimalist kaleidoscope of translucent shapes overlapping one another with McGee’s signature visible in the bottom right-hand corner.

Detroit Foundation Hotel general manager Bob Lambert says the hotel will spend $45,000 on the week-long restoration of the roughly 60-foot-by-40-foot mural.

“It’s not about the money for us. It’s about maintaining what was here before us and bringing back to life this beautiful piece,” says Lambert, speaking in front of the mural. “We think it’s a really big part of the building, so we want to preserve it.”

Massey says McGee personally signed off on the project and worked with the artist to select the correct colors for the project.

“I had to sit down and have a conversation with him about the primary colors, secondary colors and making sure everything was right,” says Massey.

The mural was originally created as part of an ambitious public arts works program in the 1970s that saw McGee and other artists — including David Rubello, Steve Foust, John Egner and others — creating 14-large-scale murals throughout Detroit.

While smaller in scale, the program mirrors concepts like the popular street art festival Murals in the Market in Eastern Market but actually predates the term “street art” by at least a decade.

Other intact murals from the era include Egner’s mural on the north side of the Park Shelton Apartments in Midtown.

The majority of the murals — like Alvin D. Loving’s 20,000-square-foot “Message to Demar and Lauri” mural on the First National Building and Rubello’s “Color Cubes” mural on the Jillian Madison building — have been completely removed or covered with advertisements.

When Massey completes his week-long restoration of the mural using around 15 to 20 gallons of paint, it will mark the rare occasion that a piece of faded artwork like this sees a successful restoration — even McGee’s signature will be preserved.

Back in the 1960s, “there were a lot of artists doing public art and they were celebrating the culture and history of certain communities,” says Massey. “Charles McGee is a real inspiration. I’m honored to be a part of revitalizing this mural and bringing it back into the fold.”

McGee’s influence on the city’s art scene has been staggering, including decades of arts advocacy, teaching, curating and creating across a range of mediums.

Locally, he has prominent pieces at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, the Detroit People Mover Broadway station, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He has been shown nationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as in touring exhibitions at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. In 2008, he was named the first Kresge Eminent Artist, a prize that comes with a $50,000 purse.

More:New 11-story Detroit mural will be work of artist Charles McGee, 92

This year, he was given the 2019 Legacy Award in recognition of a lifetime of achievements from the non-profit Michigan Legacy Art Park in Thompsonville.

Though he suffered a stroke in 2011, McGee’s output has remained steady, and his notoriety has only grown as African-American artists start to see their time in the spotlight after decades of being overlooked.

Coast-to-coast, museums and collectors are spending millions on expanding collections focused on artists like Mark Bradford, Jean-Michel Basquiat and McArthur Binion, a Chicago artist who graduated from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art and who sells pieces for as high as $450,000.

Massey is a former Kresge Arts Fellow who has defined his career through his fresco techniques. He’s considered one of a handful of artists working in the craft of fresco today, and most likely the only African-American. His work is featured locally at the Charles H. Wright Museum and at the Flint Museum of Art, where he is originally from.

Last year, Massey completed a massive new 30-foot-by-30-foot fresco inside Cobo Center in downtown Detroit — just a block from the McGee mural he’s currently restoring.