By: David Misch

Done by eBaums World, The Detroit Project follows well-known graffiti artist and subvertising connoisseur Ron English and family in an All-American pastime: the road trip.

Ron English has gained notoriety for the past twenty years with his subversive twisting of cultural icons and images. He’s been featured in multiple documentaries, including Supersize Me (2004), and has appeared in countless art magazines, journals, and walls all across the States and beyond.

So, what does The Detroit Project have to offer new? Ron English is already famous, successful, and both critically and commercially acknowledged for his work, and graffiti and subvertising have become embedded within the modern lexicon of not only the art world but laymen as well. But unlike any other documentaries ever produced before, The Detroit Project offers the keen though subtle insight that is commonly overlooked in the study of graffiti—the graffiti artists, be them vandals or unconventional artists, are still people with real lives and families and concerns.

The Detroit Project showcases how normal not only Ron English is but graffiti entirely. That’s not to say that all families before or after will take road trips to their wives’ hometowns for the expressed purpose of showing their kids how run down Detroit is and how that provides the perfect opportunity to highlight how graffiti thrives in depreciated and undervalued environments. But it’s the closest to normality that graffiti perhaps has to offer, and that very well might be good enough.

The family dynamic is not a new aspect of any documentary, but when done from a different angle subtle revelations appear. Such as the fact that despite having a subversive, rebellious dad who gets paid for a living to paint both illegal and legal images on walls and other architecture all across the globe as well as create artwork that will more than likely be studied for years to come, Mars and Zephyr English (Ron’s kids) still distance themselves from their father’s personality both visibly and mentally by dressing in Abercrombie and Fitch and obeying dreaded laws. It’s like the inversion of most other families. Rebellion through obeisance is certainly an odd gesture.

But it works for the English family. Living in the suburbs of upstate New York in a colonial-style house with a nice, manicured lawn, it’s an odd juxtaposition. On the one hand, they’re like any other family. And on another end, they’re nothing like any other family. Embodying the paradox of the American nuclear family unit, The English’s are your everyday walking contradiction.

In terms of graffiti, The Detroit Project offers little new information. It’s widely known that because of the urban decay of the Detroit Area that the city’s become a virtual Mecca for graffiti artists and writers, spanning from big names like BANKSY and Shepard Fairey, to which Ron English is perhaps only one of a large group of artists traveling from miles away to paint the city walls of Detroit.

But it’s a story within a story. While covering the obvious special interest revolving around Ron English and his artwork, The Detroit Project shows us the upside of graffiti uplifting and uniting a family, along with how beautiful urban decay can sometimes be.

For more information and another interview see below. To watch The Detroit Project. And for even further information about Ron English, click Popaganda.