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
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...
Firearm Injury, Art, and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)
By Mary C. Byron, BA. The NEA Lab’s approach to firearm injury prevention using public art explores practices that are both novel and cutting-edge but also comparable to concepts that have been around for more than half a century such as Crime Prevention Through...
Busy Streets Theory and Public Art
By Skyla Chitwood, BS and Haley Crimmins, MPH. The UM National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Lab has begun a study to better establish a link between public art and firearm injury prevention. A pilot study conducted by the University of Michigan previously...