Kevin Joy and his North End mural-in-progress.

Kevin Joy meets me in front of his massive mural-in-progress on the side of Red Door Digital Design Studio. The piece stretches more than 120 feet along the side of the building, at the gateway of the North End neighborhood, and is a veritable who’s-who showcasing Joy’s arsenal of recurring characters and visual motifs.

Joy takes the North End into his own hands.

For a street artist like Kevin Joy, permission pieces and gallery work—such as his much acclaimed contribution to the current “Big Paintings @ The Factory” show—take a backseat to installations in abandoned buildings. Joy’s style has pervaded Detroit’s collective subconscious, from the light-post giraffe outside of Traffic Jam, to one of his most notable unauthorized works, the notorious facelift he and three friends gave to the United Artists building, spending years in the early 2000s covering the windows in signs and symbols.

A piece by Taylor Sheppard, featured in the collected works of Kevin Joy, single edition.

Part II of a triptych.

Joy’s contribution at the North End Community Garden.

This and countless other of Joy’s works are personally catalogued within a publisher’s blank of a medical dictionary, a massive tome that is the single authoritative collection of his installations. Its companion is the sketchbook that Joy has worked into for years, full of his complex original and obsessively appropriated symbology, as well as concept sketches for the commission pieces and rare, salable works that help cover the bases financially.

A page from Joy’s sketchbook.

Just a few of Joy’s Morton’s girls, which acts as his unlikely muse, rendered in a constant process of repetition and variety that he likens to a “jazz riff.”

The balance between the pure experience of art on its own terms and the earthly demands of making a living is one of the underlying contradictions of Joy’s practice, omnipresent in his existence just as his grasshoppers, remixed Adult Swim characters, and endless variations on the Morton’s Salt Girl haunt his sketchbooks. Reprocessing these characters is just one form of reappropriation that is Joy’s signature; in a larger sense the whole practice of street art is rooted in recreating spaces, reclaiming them for himself.

Source inspiration, concept sketch, and final rendition of “Freak Flag,” derived from an MC5 poster.

From the larger-than-life mural at Red Door, to “Freak Flag” at the Factory, to pieces all over the untamed studio space he shares with a cat as rangy and street-smart as her master, Joy is flying flags of his nation and his own making. Long may he reign!