Bald and bearded, he dresses so unassumingly that he seems to be hiding in plain sight. When I first met him the day before, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, where he had a solo show, he was clearly suspicious — he started out asking me the questions and not the other way around. But he warmed up when I described to him how, earlier that day, after having flown in from New York, I drove past my own childhood home in the Detroit suburbs. A dreamy smile stretched across his face. “So you’re telling me that when you come back, you let yourself go back into the past, and you remember?” he asked. “And you can see yourself, in your mind, playing in that house?” This was how he felt about Heidelberg. “It’s a special street,” he said. “It’s a special place that — that I can’t leave. I can hear it talking to me.”

[Should art be a battleground for social justice?]

Even as Detroit emptied out over the decades, Guyton stayed put, returning to the scene of his childhood with a compulsory repetition. He was unwilling to watch the street he loved so much crumble into nothing. As more and more families left, he took what remained, the odd leftovers, the detritus of neglect, and reconfigured all of it into his sculptures and paintings and installations, holding up a kind of cracked mirror to the street and everything that had been lost there. Taken as a whole, the project is a reverse memento mori — an assertion of life, a work that announces “I’m still here,” even as everyone else seemed to look away.