Ziggy's Painted Barns in Southeastern Michigan (#1)

Mona - Haggerty Road-Bloomfield Twp

 

The Painted Barns of Southeastern Michigan was the short-lived artistic expression of a 1970s MSU graduate student. Using the pseudonym Ziggy Grabowski, Doug Tyler painted a dozen barns after he was awarded a National Endowment for the arts grant in 1976.   Tyler adapted classical works of art on the sides of barn in Livingston, North Oakland and Ingram Counties. His classic portraits included two Mona Lisa, Paul Revere, and an Italian Noblemen Baldaissaire Contiglione. Back then anyone driving US 23 near Fenton had the pleasure of seeing his artwork headed in both directions north and south.

Baldaissaire - Northbound US 23 near Fenton

One summer in the mid to late 70s my mom read an article about Ziggy and as one of our many Sunday Drives, we set out to visit the ones in the article-about ten of them. I took pictures of all of them and made a collage on an old corkboard. When I moved to Kalamazoo to attend Western Michigan University in 1978 I took my barn collage and hung it in my tiny dorm room as a reminder of one of my many adventures with mom. She (and my dad) were truly the inspiration for my love of exploring the world around me!

That first semester, one of my fellow dorm mates admired the barn collage and every time she came to our room shPe commented how cool it was that Ziggy had painted all those beautiful old barns. On one of those occasions I gave it to her. She loved it! I had every intention of getting all the pictures reprinted when I returned home, but that never happened and over the years those negatives disappeared. I have thought of those barns often over the decades. 

In 2003 I graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a Masters in Historic Preservation. During my time in grad school I checked the Michigan Barn and Farmstead Survey looking and hoping someone had documented a few of them and posted a few pictures, but alas there were none that I found. I have thought a lot of them since then. They are now probably all gone, I know the two on US 23 are, but last year I was determined to find a few pictures to honor the memory of Ziggy's artistic endeavors during that decade of discovery. 

I placed an inquiry on one of my historic preservation focused Facebook pages and the two pictures above are a result. They deserve credit for the pictures, but like the negatives I have no idea who they are or the page I retrieved them. But now all these decades later I want you to know about them and I think they would too...enjoy!

A few days after I originally posted this article I had the pleasure of going to Mackinaw Island with my dear friend Lori and her grandson. On the way home we were talking about the barns and in what seemed like less than one minute Lori found a link to an article with almost all the barns and a link to Doug Tyler who was a professor at St. Mary's Notre Dame in 2014. 

Ziggy went on to teach the next generation! You can find links to see the other barns in other articles.

Murals on Barns?

Professor Tyler's Mural Gallery