A horse named Champagne is the star of a new public mural in Michigan commissioned by the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA). Wrapping around two exterior walls of the mane-tenance barn in the animal’s home in Waterford Township, “Champagne’s Chateau” was commemorated on Saturday, August 22, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and meet-and-greet with Champagne herself.
One of eight murals that will be debuted across the Detroit metro area this year as part of the DIA’s Partners in Public Art Program (PIPA), the work is installed in Waterford’s Hess-Hathaway Park, a 165-acre community park comprised of trails and an “animal exhibit farm” housing horses, chickens, goats, sheep, peacocks, and bunnies.
If the last seven centuries of Western art history have been more or less defined by patronage and the unruliness of the open market, the equine mural by Flint-based artist Johnny Fletcher resurrects a tradition more akin to that of the medieval icon painting. While not clad in a halo or resolutely religious, Champagne is certainly depicted as an icon. Painted at a monumental scale on the barn’s front, she grazes in all her foreshortened glory in a field of sunflowers under a psychedelic sunset that wraps around the barn’s side. There, a billy goat, a flock of chickens, and a trio of ducks roam throughout a Midwestern farm scene outfitted with a red barn, an old windmill, and a spring-fed pond.
