Have you ever seen one in person? You’re looking down at your phone, late for a lunch meeting, or maybe you’re grumbling about traffic or parking or your to-do list, and then — you see it. A burst of bright color. A whimsical creature staring back at you from an Ann Arbor sidewalk. You’re not quite sure what you’re looking at, but you love it. The angst you were just feeling subsides, if only for a minute. Suddenly, you’re just there, in the moment, looking at things differently — more curiously, more full of wonder, more full of joy.
That’s a David Zinn sighting, the Ann Arbor sidewalk artist who transforms our streets with his imaginative work.
For decades, Zinn has been reimagining overlooked corners of Ann Arbor into something unexpected. His medium: chalk and charcoal. His canvas: our sidewalks. His inspiration: often what we might call a blemish — a crack, a pothole, fragments of the pavement itself, even gum underfoot. Everything is intentionally temporary. The work is ephemeral, often gone with the next rain. And that’s precisely the point.
“Ephemeral art has some very special qualities because it focuses your energy on the process of making the art instead of on the art that you make,” Zinn says. It’s a kind of liberation. Without the pressure of permanence or judgment — of wondering, “Is this good enough? Where will it go?” — there’s a freedom in it.
Zinn isn’t drawing for others. He creates simply because he wants to. In fact, he assumes most of what he creates may go unseen, by anyone but him or perhaps a single passerby.
“Maybe only one person sees it,” he says. “There’s something special about that…that I might share this piece of art not with thousands of people for hundreds of years, but with one person who happened to look down at the same place at the right time, before it’s gone. We may never meet, but we’re the only two people who saw this thing exist while it existed.”
While it’s true a single drawing might be witnessed by just one passerby, it can also be viewed by thousands, thanks to an Instagram post that goes viral. That tension is part of what makes his work so compelling. It isn’t created for an audience, and yet when discovered, it feels almost personally placed, as if you happened upon something meant just for you. It jolts you, or “rattles you out of your routine,” as Zinn puts it, pulling you into the present, into the moment itself.
Want to see the sidewalk magic unfold in real time? From July 16–18, Zinn will be at the Ann Arbor Art Fair for Chalk the Walk on East Liberty Street, giving Ann Arborites a chance to experience the work as it’s meant to be: in the moment, right at your feet — at least until the inevitable summer storm rolls through and carries it away.
Learn more at zinnart.com.
"Maybe only one person sees it, and there’s something special about that. We’re the only two people who saw this thing exist while it existed."