DETROIT — Nine vacant houses he considered his works of art, including the beloved House of Soul covered with thousands of vinyl LPs, had burned to the ground; the arsonist unknown.

“I went over and someone had dropped off a TV set in the middle of the street and I left it there for three days,” say Tyree Guyton, of a discouraged moment last year at his Heidelberg Project on a street with the same name.

Leaving any debris in the street, let alone a TV, was unusual for Guyton, known for sweeping the road and cutting the grass. “But on Sunday, I had an epiphany!” He would create Heidelberg TV.

“It’s just a [wooden, 8-by-6-foot] TV frame, and you get behind it and truly animate it.”

Neighborhood kids came over and acted out their own shows; one girl appointed herself the weather girl and gave daily reports.

“Imagination allows you to go from Point A to Point B,” Guyton, 61, says.

He ought to know. Imagination has carried him from this gritty Detroit street on which he grew up and lived as an adult, to the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where his work is exhibited through Jan. 3. It includes that TV frame.

He had a year’s residency in Basel, Switzerland and in November he’ll head to China to build a large piece – perhaps a house — for the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. (Read more about this intriguing international show at en.szhkbiennale.org.)

“It’s hope. It’s creating a visual. It’s been my own personal medicine that I share with the world,” he told The Blade on a hot September day.

Guyton’s grandmother took him to church, his grandfather, who worked at Ford Motor Co. and painted houses, encouraged him to paint.

In 1986 Guyton painted a red circle on the empty house next to his grandparents. “The people moved out and gave me the keys,” he says. Joined by his wife, their children (he has six), and neighborhood kids, he collected discarded objects — stuffed animals, armless dolls, kiddie kitchens, and tables. Things were painted, nailed to houses and roofs, set in funny or eerie, or simply odd juxtapositions.

Hundreds of shoes rise in a conical pile. Upside-down shopping carts top a lopped-off tree. Toy trucks and wig-heads, car hoods, stoves with gaping ovens, telephones, a bike attached to a trash can full of crutches. And thousands of dead plastic stuff such as a toy horse on a castle on a milk crate.

The house he grew up in no longer stands but the big old Dotty Wotty polka dot one does; his mother and sister live there. He’s one of 10 children; three of his brothers died from drugs, one from being shot.

For much of the Heidelberg Project’s duration, the aesthetic question has been is it art or eyesore? Perhaps, at almost 30, it doesn’t matter.

With 200,000 visitors a year (lots of whom simply cruise the street, windows up, doors locked), tour buses, and many Europeans, it’s said to be the third most-visited cultural site in the city after the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, says Jenenne Whitfield, executive director of the Heidelberg Project and Guyton’s wife.

Another plus, she adds: The project’s audience is more diverse and it’s done more for race relations than either of those well-established museums.

The street, now more grassy lots than homes, has certainly won cachet among hipsters in this scrappy town. Example: In August, hundreds of middle-classers attended the swanky Diner en Blanc here. [Diner en Blanc is an international phenomenon a la the flash mob. People in a participating city receive a last-minute invite to an elegant gourmet picnic at an interesting urban location. Attendees, usually packed and ready to go, dress in white formal wear, brush up on their etiquette, and arrive with white tablecloths, china, candles, flowers, scrumptious food and wine, along with tables and chairs they set up in long lines. Everybody has a rollicking time — Toledo has yet to organize a Diner en Blanc.]

But no Detroit mayor has visited except the late Coleman Young, who led the city from 1974 to 1994. He came once, Guyton says, and signed the guestbook, as have people from 140 countries. Singer Paul Simon, here last month with his family, scrawled “To Tyree with great respect and admiration.”

What’s in a name?

It’s called an outdoor art environment and urban art. The curators at the UM museum in Ann Arbor describe it as a “site-specific art installation” and display his smaller, studio-created work in The Art of Tyree Guyton: A Thirty-Year Journey. He spent weeks at UM last month, talking and working with students, few of whom would have cause to venture into the ‘hood.

“His lectures are full. People are excited about, curious about it,” says MaryAnn Wilkinson, the museum’s adjunct curator of modern art. She also organized two shows of the project while she was a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

“One of the lessons we have learned in the 20th century is that art is not just paint on canvas. It’s all kinds of things that spring from the imagination of the artist, put together in ways that other people would never think of,” she says.

“Most people look at it say, ‘This is amazing!’”She suggests skeptics look for new associations; new patterns, rhythms, and colors, and “keep an open mind about what art is and what the artist’s intentions are.”

Halona Norton-Westbrook says it’s about purpose. Guyton’s goal is to actively engage the community. “It’s easy for audiences to embrace,” says Norton-Westbrook, a curator at the Toledo Museum of Art. Such works become stronger when they achieve the effect the artist intended.

An element of contemporary art is that it sometimes happens in the moment and sometimes in public spaces. “People respond to contemporary art experiences,” that can be “somewhere between being an object and an experience,” Norton-Westbrook says.

Guyton, who drives a red 1999 Ford F-150 pickup, knows all this. “It’s about all kinds of people coming together, realizing we’re all in this together.”

The test of time

Longevity has its rewards. In the 1980s, Guyton said he was told he didn’t fit in as a student at Detroit’s College of Creative Studies — too outside the box for the art school. “But in 2009, they awarded me my [honorary] doctorate,” he says with pride. “I wasn’t going to accept it but Jenenne pulled my coattails and said ‘Go.’ ”

Whitfield, 54, “was sent,” he says, perhaps by angels. They met when she drove down Heidelberg Street 23 years ago and he engaged her in an hour-long conversation. She came back the next day; a year later, she quit her job at a bank and devoted herself to making the project — “the challenge of a lifetime,” she says — a success.

“We’ve always been partners. I do a lot of the writing.” She wrote grants, assembled a strong board of directors, and in 2009, received a $100,000 grant.

The couple live above the project’s office in an old building just off Woodward Avenue between downtown and the largely gentrified Wayne State University area. Guyton’s studio, below, is stacked with paintings on all sizes of boards and canvas.

At the UM museum, four cameras will show real-time rebuilding of the House of Soul memorial, now called the Holy Space. Its wooden skeleton, adorned with LPs, was built on the charred foundation of its predecessor.

“When you come to the Heidelberg Project, I want you to think — really think! My art is a medicine for the community. You can’t heal the land until you heal the minds of the people,” he wrote on his website.

At 3 p.m. Nov. 8, MaryAnn Wilkinson, the show’s curator, will speak about Guyton’s artistic journey. and at 3 p.m. Dec. 6, a pair of U-M professors will discuss his work. The free museum is at 525 S. State St. in Ann Arbor.

First Published October 18, 2015, 4:00 a.m.