MESSAGE TO DEMAR AND LAURI.
The first large-scale mural to decorate a building in downtown Detroit, Message to Demar and Lauri is commissioned by the nonprofit Art for Detroit, funded by Detroit Renaissance, and painted on an expansive, east-facing back wall of the First National Building in 1971. It is designed by the pioneering African-American abstract artist Alvin Loving , Rubello's classmate at Cass Tech High School, and named after the artist's daughters.8 Its geometric, "polychrome cube" imagery is typical of Loving's work from the time.
Covering 20,000 square feet, Message to Demar and Lauri is described in 1971 by Frank Kolbert, a member of Art for Detroit and a representative of the Detroit Institute of Arts, as "the largest painting of its kind in the world."6
Two painters from Environmental Design Associates, a Brunswick, Minnesota firm, are responsible for executing it.6 When Rubello visits the First National Building's new art gallery to drop off work for his 1971 solo show, the creation of Message to Demar and Lauri is underway, and he spends a few minutes chatting with the two painters before they ascend.
Later that day, there is a fatal accident that results in one of the painters falling 14 stories to the parking lot below. His death devastates Alvin Loving, born in Detroit but then living in New York, who never returns to see the finished mural.
Message to Demar and Lauri is sandblasted off the First National Building sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. A faint impression of its outline remains.
See FIRST NATIONAL BUILDING , MURALS , and PUBLIC ART