
NEA Lab Blog
See updates on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Lab’s current work in Detroit examining best practices for commissioning public art through community engagement to improve health, and social/emotional well-being by reducing youth firearm injury.

“Untitled” by Fel’le (2019). Detroit CityWalls Program.
Recent Blog Posts
Metadata for Public Art
By Mary C. Byron, BA. When the U-M NEA Lab team formed our database of public art in Detroit, metadata was used to identify specific traits of certain artworks and the environment that surrounds the work. Metadata, in plain terms, is data about informational aspects...
Detroit Public Art Spotlight
By Mary C. Byron, BA. Detroit is a city full of murals that help shared messages and impact the way people feel about the areas they live. This is a second installation of featured murals and art from the NEA Lab Detroit Public Art database. See the first post...
An Inside Look at the NEA Lab’s Detroit Public Art Database – Selecting Control Sites
By Mary C. Byron, BA. The NEA Lab has been building a database of public art works in Detroit to investigate the impacts of public art on the prevalence of firearm violence and crime in the area. A key part of evaluating these impacts is having “control sites” (sites...
Detroit Murals Spotlight
By Mary C. Byron, BA. Detroit is a city full of murals that help spread a rich cultural history and reflect a strong sense of community. Here are a few murals from our Detroit Public Art database in the first of several mural spotlights to be highlighted in the NEA...
A Summer Finding Art in Detroit
By Shreya Sampath and Mary C. Byron, BA. Shreya Sampath, a U-M undergraduate student studying Architecture, is a research assistant at the NEA Lab. She spent the Summer of 2023 documenting artworks in Detroit for the lab’s public art database, and in this post she...