Sal Rodriguez
Jordan “Tead” Vaughn at an exhibition of his work at Detroit’s Inner State Gallery, 2013.
After Detroit street artist Jordan “Tead” Vaughn tragically died while painting a mural, his mom set up an artist residency in his honor. The TEAD One Memorial Artist in Residence Program has been offering artists three months of private studio space in Dearborn since 2021, and on Oct. 22, former cohorts will come together for a group show in his memory.
“He had quite an artistic journey,” Tead’s mother Jenny Vaughn tells Metro Times. “He had kind of just brought his work out of the shadows and was doing more gallery work [and] some fine art. He was learning that he could actually make a living off of his art and I wanted to have that platform for other artists in Detroit. His story is similar to so many other graffiti artists that are so, so talented, just with that grassroots skill that you don’t learn in a four-year college.”
The exhibit, called Emergence, will be on display until Dec. 6 at West Bloomfield’s Janice Charach Gallery, which once showed Tead’s work in the Awesome Weirdos show in 2015.
Emergence features work by Richie Blanko, Rick Brown, Kelly Burke, Cameron Jenkins, Erin Kruczek, Brian Lacey, Sabra Mormon, Martina Sanroman, Matt “Emskript” Thornton, Andrew Valdez aka The Hood Picasso, and Roberto Villalobos aka BEARLOBOS.
Courtesy photo
Erin Kruczek’s “The T Train sinks into the universe” is one of the pieces in Emergence.
In addition to the former resident artists, the show will also include work by Tead’s contemporaries Freddy Diaz (swfreddy), Rick Malt (Malt), and Chase Golematis (Fel3000ft), who were also part of the Awesome Weirdos show in 2015. “Awesome Weirdos” is what the four artists, including Tead, called themselves when they painted together.
“That show was really important to me,” gallery director Natalie Bazalovich says about Awesome Weirdos. “So this is sort of like a personal anniversary-type memorial show in my mind. The parents of Janice Charach opened this gallery in her name because she passed at a young age tragically, and the same thing is going on with the residency and Tead and his mom. So we kind of have the same mission going and it just seemed like a really good fit for us to do this.
Tead was 34 years old when he fell through a roof at the art complex that houses Recycle Here (and now Dreamtroit) and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Charach died from cancer at the age of 39.
After the completion of the residency, participating artists are invited to use a group studio space to continue their practice.
In addition to the Emergence artists, some of Tead’s work will also be on display.
“Tead had a pretty impactful mark on a lot of artists that are now becoming more prevalent, so it’s important to preserve what he did… and have respect for the people who laid the groundwork for artists to be able to get hired to do murals,” Bazalovich says. “They’re not just going and doing it because they want to do it in the dark and trying to hide from the cops and stuff, like they’re getting paid to do this now around the city and it’s so awesome. If Tead was still around, he’d be so happy.”
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