Berkley hopes plaza will be space for community gathering, reflection

BERKLEY — A plaza outside Berkley High School was unveiled earlier this month after years in development.

In development since the summer of 2020, the ArtSpace community plaza held its grand opening on July 15. It is located at the corner of Coolidge Highway and Catalpa Drive near Berkley High School.

A collaboration between the city of Berkley, the Berkley School District and the Downtown Development Authority, the plaza provides an area for residents, students and visitors to sit, view art or get something to eat from a visiting food truck.

Superintendent Scott Francis called the new plaza a great area for community gathering.

“We envision this as a space where people can come together and socialize, have a meal,” he said. “It’s designed intentionally here to have food trucks to bring people together. So we’re excited about that.”

The plaza contains six large panels featuring art made by Berkley High School students and alumni. The pieces were made by Ellie Kubicki, Katelyn Long, Ella Sturtz, Mia Echlin, Matilda Wittig and Oliver Moss.

According to DDA Executive Director Mike McGuinness, these panels will be swapped out for new art almost every year, and the existing art panels will find a new home somewhere in the downtown.

“That way, we have another cycle of Berkley high school student artists who are featured,” he said. “I’m looking forward to us leveraging the existing panels to circulate through other parts of our downtown as we expand our murals offered in the downtown, public art installations and of course, our dynamic downtown art festivals.”

Kubicki, 19, painted a mountain range for one of the panels. A 2022 graduate at the high school, Kubicki said she was happy with how the work turned out and to have a piece of art she made on display in Berkley.

“I’m really excited to have (my art) be in my hometown,” she said. “No matter where it ends up, I’ll be excited. I’ll go check it out. So a piece of me will always be here in Michigan in Berkley.”

At the center of the plaza is a bronze sculpture, made by 2013 Berkley High School graduate Austen Brantley, called “Walking Together.” A professional sculptor, Brantley gave the school district three ideas for the plaza, and the district chose “Walking Together.”

“It happened to be this piece, which is about two Black teenagers just walking down Coolidge pretty much. So I want people to see themselves in the piece, especially people like me,” Brantley said.

He also said the young male figure, in a way, is a representation of himself.

“It was like a reconciliation with a lot of things that I went through here,” he said of his art. “It feels like I get to find out who I really am. It’s like I became who I really was all that time, because I remember at Berkley High School when I was in ceramics, all my friends thought I was just being weird by not just playing sports with everybody else, because I took ceramics just as, like, an elective so I could keep playing football, because my grades were bad. I remember just, like, finding myself in that class, you know, like really finding what I want to do with my life. And then everyone was telling me, ‘No.’ Everybody, and I just stick with who I was. So this sculpture is kind of the fruition of all of that and everything that I went through. If you notice, the texture is very dilapidated and that was on purpose. That is how I felt walking to school every day.”

Brantley said in a speech during the opening that it was great that students will have their art featured at the plaza.

“I hope that it’s an area that people can come by and just sit down and think. When I was in high school at Berkley, we didn’t have a space like this,” he said.

“When I made this sculpture, I wanted to kind of capture something about how I felt walking to school. I used to walk down Coolidge, I used to walk home … and I remember just what it kind of felt like walking every day, just thinking about what you went through that day and reflecting, and I kind of wish there was a space like this. So I’m very, very fortunate, and I’m just grateful that I was able to create something for this plaza.”