A mural honoring Aretha Franklin was vandalized in Detroit on Saturday, The Detroit Free Press reports.
Richard Wilson, the London-based artist who drew the mural depicting a Franklin album cover, said he had to fix up the piece in the city’s Eastern Market after someone poured paint on his work.
“I finished it yesterday evening … all happy,” he said. “I came back this morning just to tidy up a bit, check if there’s anything I missed or anything.”
Wilson said he spent 12 days working on the piece for the Murals in the Market public art event.
Richard Wilson, a London-based artist in Detroit for #MuralsInTheMarket, is fixing up his mural featuring Aretha Franklin and other famous Detroit records after it was splattered by paint left in a cherry picker and inadvertently vandalized overnight. @freep pic.twitter.com/qxGwKYBNE1
— Aleanna Siacon (@AleannaSiacon) September 29, 2018
“It’s like they had a paint party here, and it’s just splattered all over the place,” Wilson said.
The Queen of Soul died on Aug. 16 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
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Teddy is a multimedia journalist who serves as the culture and political writer for EBONY. His work has appeared in NBC's Owned and Operated stations, as well as DNAInfo, which covered local neighborhood news in New York City. He received his Masters in Journalism from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY in 2017.