Citing free speech, Rosa Parks house artist pushes forward

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The artist who turned a house in Detroit where Rosa Parks once lived into an art piece says he’s working to ensure the home is displayed in Rhode Island even after Brown University pulled its support.

Ryan Mendoza says he has a First Amendment right to show the house. The Ivy League institution told a donor who helped pay for the project that it was threatened with legal action by an institute that claims to own the rights to Parks’ name. Mendoza is working with a local arts group for legal help and to find the money and other support they need to move forward. He said in an interview Sunday he has a right to continue.

“It’s a bit presumptuous on the part of Brown that they would consider themselves as having the possibility of cancelling the show. This show cannot be cancelled,” Mendoza said in an interview next to the house that has been partially reassembled in an arts centre in Providence.

The tiny house was owned by Parks’ brother, and people including relatives, neighbours and others have said she lived there for a time after she fled the south amid death threats for refusing to give up her bus seat. Her brother later lost the home to foreclosure, and the house ended up on a demolition list. Parks’ niece, Rhea McCauley, bought it for $500 and connected with Mendoza, who had worked with abandoned homes in Detroit. She gave it to Mendoza, who took it apart piece by piece and shipped it to Germany, were he reassembled it in his yard in Berlin.

There, it drew a steady stream of visitors and gained a higher profile. Mendoza eventually said he received requests from multiple venues to bring the house there and selected Brown because in recent years it had publicly grappled with its historical ties to the slave trade.

Mendoza spent the last few months disassembling the house, sending parts across the Atlantic Ocean by ship and reassembling it at the WaterFire Arts Center, a few miles from Brown’s campus, which the Ivy League university brought in as a venue. There, it was to open to the public next month with free admission. Plans were in the works for Brown to display a civil rights exhibit alongside the house, with school children visiting and Brown students acting as docents, according to Barnaby Evans, WaterFire’s executive artistic director.

The house was about 80 per cent assembled when Brown announced on Thursday that the display was cancelled. It cited an unspecified dispute involving the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which Parks co-founded but which has feuded with relatives for years.

A Brown spokesman refused to discuss the nature of the dispute, saying it was not a party to it.