"Try everything"—reflections on John Egner's monumental mural

I was sorry to learn today of the passing of John Egner (1940-2021), an influential Detroit artist and teacher at Wayne State who was born in Philadelphia and lived for the last 30 years in the Catskills. (Read Detroit artist Scott Hocking's wonderful and informative tribute to John here.) We never met in person but talked on the phone early in the pandemic as part of my research into the abstract public art that proliferated in Detroit in the late 1960s and early '70s.

My favorite painting by John is “After Blood” (1985), a large work that is currently installed somewhat unassumingly on the 3rd floor of WSU’s undergrad library (if a 9 x 12 ft painting could ever be said to do anything unassumingly). I love to visit it and wonder at its sensual synthesis of the organic and the seemingly machined.

But I called John to talk about about a much bigger work, his monumental (96' x 48') untitled mural, painted in 1974 on the Park Shelton, a historic high rise in Detroit's Cultural Center.

Park Shelton Hotel: Mural on North Wall (1974). Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

His was one of three large-scale murals commissioned by Detroit Renaissance, a powerful nonprofit development organization that was focused on stimulating economic growth in post-Rebellion Detroit. (They were also responsible for dreaming up and building the Renaissance Center, the 72 story hotel and office tower complex that has stood as a controversial symbol of the city for more than 40 years.)

The other two murals commissioned by Detroit Renaissance, by artists Al Loving and Aris Koutroulis, are long gone, but John's mural still exists, sort of, in bastardized form. John told me that he eventually came to disown the work, which had been guaranteed for ten years by its commissioners, when much of it was erased by a painted "Park Shelton Apartments" sign and an addition to the building's parking garage.

John Egner's untitled Detroit mural in 2010, courtesy of One More Spoke

A more recent refresh of the remaining elements, meanwhile, further deviates from his original design with the addition of a great block of blue where the Park Shelton sign used to be. Last year he told me, “Where I stand now is, it's not my painting, and it's not what it once was, but it's clean at least, and bright, and it's got some memory of what it was. It's OK with me. It is what it is. And I know it's well out of my control.”

Remnants of John Egner's mural in context on Woodward Ave. in 2021

Of the experience of making his mural, John told me, “It was without question the biggest, most important, most public thing I had ever done.” I asked him about the origins of the design, which though abstract, evoked “the feel of the Park Shelton building, the curve of Woodward Avenue, and the distance of the downtown,” as he put it, and served as a sign to motorists and pedestrians that they were entering the Cultural Center.

In answer he supplied the quote below, which I’ll leave in tribute to a beloved artist and teacher whose influence is still palpably felt among many in Detroit’s artist communities.

I had been working with grid paper and colored squares in drawing form. That motif, colored squares, was not new to me. But I did many, many, many drawings over a period of weeks or even months to arrive at that design with that specific purpose. My process at the time was—I was doing systemic things. Say if you took a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 paper and gridded it off in quarter inch squares, one black, two whites—and went back and forth like that, as if you were weaving—there would be this crazy looking moiré pattern, where you put two grids on top of each other. Then I was taking those very elaborate, complex moiré patterns and overlapping 'em, first one way, then the other, coloring some squares and not others. It was a very rigorous, systemic process. I don't start with an idea of what I want it to look like; I start with the process and accept what it looks like, see what it yields. That's characteristic of my work, no matter what medium I’m working in: that the process is key and the image is accepted. My process at the time would have been, "try anything, try everything." I was a binge worker, I could sit at my kitchen table or drawing board and just do every possible way of overlapping. My process was, exhaust the possibilities here, do everything I can with this set of images or tools or ideas or whatever. So I wasn't looking for a particular result….I more or less backed into it. If at some point it looked like a building with Woodward Avenue curving, it evoked it in the vaguest kind of way. It was not a specific intention. It was an ah-ha moment: "This kinda looks like that. Gee, that makes it really appropriate for this!" I more or less backed into it.

-John Egner, RIP