12: IZZY HEDIN-URRUTIA ON CRYING IN THE RIVRA ROOM
I have been to the Detroit Institute of Arts many times. Even in my dreams, I stand here: in the center of the floor compass that marks off cardinal directions in marble and metal. Diego Rivera’s famous mural haunts the second floor. I am spinning, noticing, and hunting, too, across panels of intricately painted representations of the processes of rebirth and death and initiation. The largest panels on two opposing walls are, of course, the most recognizable. They hold within them the deep admiration from Rivera for Detroit, particularly for the city’s legacy of rebellion, percolating inside automotive factories and the comradery that unionized their assembly lines. Yet, the surrounding, smaller panels—Rivera’s representations of warplanes, of pulsing bodies and clouds of chemicals; of his “four races” and the natural elements of sand, water, stone, and earth—these are what I am searching through. I’m searching for a world so many of us leftists dream of, just beyond our reach and yet so close it plays upon our imaginations like a memory. The framing constructs a threshold—a beckoning into a history of machinery, oil, smoke, and towards all that is possible through the indomitable collective spirit of humanity. Hidden amidst the panels, less concrete than the imagery itself—or perhaps, thematically embedded within—is also a warning of a future in the wake of capitalism: where the greed of corporate empires and warhawks threaten to sweep away everything, into glass and sand, to do—what, exactly?
I have visited this room long before becoming a communist, and long after. I often find myself wrapped up in the organizational work, all of the details that make it possible: all of the coordination of rallies, the midnight strategy meetings, the turbulent intricacies inherent in inter-group dynamics. I often find myself despairing in the face of fascism, the kind that separates families, isolates children in cages and churns our lives into mottled fogs of consumption and exploitation. Here, in the Rivera room, I am surrounded by reminders of where we have been, and where we are going. In the heart of Detroit, a city I see as a microcosm for the principal contradictions of late-stage capitalism in America, I believe that if change will happen for the better, it will happen here.
– Izzy, February 2026
Izzy Hedin-Urrutia (He/Him) is a transgender interdisciplinary artist, writer, and communist organizer in Detroit, Michigan. For the past three years he has served on the Board of Swords into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery as the Volunteer Coordinator and member of the Exhibition Committee, and helped found the Detroit chapter of Michigan General Defense Committee. He is a skilled fiber and comic artist, writing pages about queer alternative experience for his online comic project The Bad Homosexual. He lives with his fiance, Dan, and their two cats, Freya and Pierogi.
