Brrd Roots ~ Christ Baby Divine
Part I: The Discovery
The leopard catches me first—ceramic, spotted, impossibly alert in the corner of my laptop screen at 2:47 AM. I'm scrolling through estate sale listings in Detroit, hunting for my grandmother's china pattern, when this digital collage stops my thumb mid-swipe. Not the weathered stone figure at its center, not the cryptic symbols floating like ancient texts. The leopard. Small. Watchful. The same stance as the one my mother shattered against our kitchen wall the night she decided she was done being looked at.
I save the image. Close the laptop. Open it again.
Three months earlier, I'd stood in the abandoned Packard Plant with my camera, documenting decay for a magazine piece about "ruins porn" that I'd eventually kill. The assignment was simple: capture Detroit's skeleton. What I found instead were fresh arrangements—someone had been creating installations in the rubble. Stone fragments positioned just so. Graffiti that looked like hieroglyphs. A ceramic leopard, pristine, watching from a window ledge five stories up.
The artist called themselves Brrd. Just that. No first name, no gallery representation, no Instagram. Only these digital collages that appeared on obscure forums, and the physical interventions scattered through the city's forgotten spaces. I'd been tracking them for six weeks before I found this piece, titled with casual blasphemy: "Christ Baby Divine."
Part II: The Research Thread
Detroit Public Library, Local History Room. The librarian, Marcus, brings me another box.
"You're the third person asking about street installations this month," Marcus says, setting down files from 1967. "But you're the first asking about the religious stuff."
The boxes contain photographs from the 12th Street riots—or the uprising, depending on who's telling. I'm looking for echoes, patterns. The way trauma inscribes itself on city walls. Marcus points to a photograph: a church mural, half-destroyed, showing figures with raised arms. The pose is nearly identical to the central figure in Brrd's collage.
"My grandmother said they painted over that mural three times," Marcus tells me. "Kept bleeding through."
He means the paint, but I write down bleeding through and circle it twice.
Dr. Angela Ramos, who teaches African Diaspora Art at Wayne State, meets me at a coffee shop that used to be a bank. The original vault door still hangs open, repurposed as Instagram backdrop. She's written about what she calls "archaeological resistance"—artists who excavate and reassemble history's fragments.
"The stone figure you're describing sounds like Nok terracotta," she says, pulling up images on her phone. "Nigerian, 500 BCE to 200 CE. But if someone's using that imagery in Detroit..."
She stops, considering.
"There's a tradition. Not well documented. Artists in the '70s, after the rebellion, started incorporating African artifacts—real and imagined—into their work. They called it 'root work.' Not roots like Alex Haley. Roots like seeking water underground."
Brrd Roots, I think. Not bird. Buried.
Part III: The Personal Excavation
My mother kept one photograph from before she left: herself at seventeen, arms raised in modern dance class at Cass Tech, the prestigious Detroit high school for the arts. In the photo, her elbows touch above her head, hands splayed—the exact gesture of Brrd's figure. When I was twelve, I found her practicing this pose in our bathroom mirror at 3 AM, crying silently.
"I'm trying to remember," she said when she saw me watching, "what it felt like to take up space."
Twenty years later, I'm in Detroit documenting someone else's attempt to take up space—or rather, to make space speak. Brrd's collages aren't just digital compositions. Each one corresponds to a physical location in the city. The leopard figurine appears in seven different installations. Always watching. Always intact among ruins.
I find the artist on my eleventh day of searching, though find suggests intention. I'm photographing the old Michigan Theatre, now a parking garage, when I see them: slight figure, face obscured by a medical mask and hood, placing objects with deliberate care. A piece of weathered stone. Green leaves—fresh bay laurel, I realize. They're recreating the digital collage in three dimensions.
"Don't," they say without looking up when I raise my camera.
"I'm writing about—"
"I know who you are. You killed the ruins porn piece."
We stand there, two people who traffic in fragments, neither willing to yield ground.
Part IV: The Scene Work
Inside the Michigan Theatre parking garage, 4 PM. Concrete pillars frame what was once the stage. Oil stains map the floor like continental drift.
Brrd unwraps the ceramic leopard from newspaper dated 1967. Their hands shake slightly—exhaustion or something else.
"My grandfather made this," they say finally. "Before the fires. He had a ceramics shop on 12th Street."
They position the leopard facing the entrance, where daylight barely reaches.
"He saved three things from the shop. This. A mold for casting faces. And a bullet that didn't fire when the National Guard pointed it at him."
I want to ask why the leopard appears in everything they make, but I understand the weight of carrying what remains. My mother saved three things too: the dance photo, her father's work gloves, and a piece of ceramic—spotted, sharp-edged—that I now realize was part of something larger.
"The stone figure," I say. "It's Nok?"
"Replica. Cast from a piece in the DIA basement. They have rooms full of African art they never display."
Brrd stands, surveys their arrangement. The installation transforms the parking garage into something else—a shrine, a question, a wound with edges dressed in beauty.
"You want to know about the title," they say. It's not a question.
"Christ Baby Divine."
"Gospel song my grandmother sang. But also—" They gesture at the space, the city beyond. "What else do you call resurrection that keeps failing? Divine comedy? Divine tragedy? Just divine?"
They pull out their phone, show me the original collage. In the digital version, there's text I hadn't noticed, tiny, woven into the background: Every third storefront empty. Every second heart. Every first born carrying what the fire couldn't take.
Part V: The Accumulation
The unemployment rate in Detroit peaked at 28.9% in 2009. Every third storefront empty, but also: every third person carrying absence like a visible weight.
The leopard appears in Mesopotamian art as a symbol of transformation—the spotted skin representing stars, navigation, finding your way through darkness.
Nok terracottas were fired in ground kilns, buried to achieve the right temperature. The act of creation required burial, required faith that what went into the earth would emerge transformed.
My mother broke the leopard figurine in 1998, the year Detroit's population fell below one million for the first time since 1920.
Brrd has created 47 installations. I've now seen 23. Each one positioned at a site of dual significance: something built and something destroyed in the same location.
The raised arms gesture appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs meaning ka—the life force that survives death.
But also: raised arms mean surrender, mean praise, mean stop shooting, mean I'm trying to remember what it felt like to take up space.
Part VI: The Vulnerable Distance
I watch myself watching Brrd work. See my own need to make meaning from fragments, to build narrative from ruins. There's comfort in being the observer, the documentarian, the one who arranges rather than reveals.
Here's what I haven't said: I came to Detroit running from my own failed transformation. A marriage that couldn't survive my mother's death. A book about trauma I couldn't finish because I kept writing around the wound instead of through it. I thought documenting someone else's archaeology might teach me something about excavation.
Here's what I'm learning: some things are meant to remain buried. Others push through like paint through primer, insisting on visibility.
The night before I leave Detroit, I dream of the leopard figurine my mother broke. In the dream, it speaks: Every fragment carries the whole pattern. Every shard knows the shape it came from.
Part VII: The Counter-Thread
"It's poverty tourism with an MFA," says James, a Detroit native who runs a community garden where Brrd placed installation #34. "Artists coming here, playing with our ruins like they're metaphors instead of people's actual lives."
He's not wrong. But also:
"Brrd's from here," I tell him.
"Being from here and being here aren't the same thing."
He shows me his own work: vegetables growing in raised beds made from reclaimed lumber, each board salvaged from a demolished house. "This is resurrection," he says. "Feeding people. Not arranging rocks for Instagram."
But later, privately, he adds: "My kids love finding Brrd's pieces. Like a treasure hunt through their own city. Makes them look different at empty lots."
This is the complexity: beauty and utility, symbol and sustenance, the need for both bread and roses—or bread and leopards, watching from windows, reminding us to see.
Part VIII: The Return
The opening image returns transformed: the leopard isn't watching us. We're watching ourselves through its eyes, seeing our need to arrange fragments, to make meaning from scatter.
Brrd sends me one final image before I leave Detroit. It's not a collage but a photograph: the ceramic leopard in what must be their studio, surrounded by hundreds of paper fragments. Each one contains a single word. I zoom in, read what I can: inheritance, muscle, telegraph, honey, ammunition, lullaby, autopsy, seedling.
"Choose seven," their message says. "Make your own arrangement."
I choose: inheritance, telegraph, honey, ammunition, lullaby, autopsy, seedling.
Later, I realize these words tell a story: what we're given (inheritance), how we signal for help (telegraph), what sweetness remains (honey), what we use to defend (ammunition), how we comfort (lullaby), how we examine what's died (autopsy), what insists on growing anyway (seedling).
Part IX: The Final Scene
My apartment, Brooklyn, 3 AM. The printed collage taped to my wall catches streetlight.
I'm arranging my own fragments now: my mother's dance photo, a piece of the ceramic she broke, my notes from Detroit, a bay leaf from the bodega that smells nothing like Brrd's laurel but serves the same purpose—invoking what's absent.
The gesture comes without thinking: arms raised, elbows touching. My mother's pose, the figure's pose, the universal pose of reaching toward something just beyond grasp. In the mirror, I look like everyone who's ever tried to hold too much history in a single body.
This is what Brrd knows, what their collages insist: we are all arrangements of what remains. Some of us digital, some dimensional. Some confined to galleries, others scattered through cities like seeds or shrapnel, depending on the day, depending on who's looking.
The leopard watches from my wall—not the broken one from my childhood but Brrd's digital version, spotted with pixels instead of glaze, transformed but recognizable. Still alert. Still witnessing.
Every fragment carries the whole pattern.
Every arrangement is both autopsy and seedling.
Every raised arm remembers what it reached for, even if the reaching fails.
Coda: The Question That Remains
Six months later, Brrd's installations start disappearing—not destroyed but carefully removed. Someone is collecting them, preserving them. The museum, some say. The community, say others. Brrd themselves, perhaps, preparing for some larger assemblage.
I receive a package with no return address. Inside: a small ceramic shard, spotted, that fits exactly with the piece my mother saved. Not completing it but extending it, suggesting a shape I can't yet see.
The note says only: Some patterns require multiple generations to complete.
I place the shard on my desk next to my laptop, where I write about other things now—living artists, breathing cities, transformations still in progress. But sometimes, at 2:47 AM, I return to the collage, to the raised arms and watching leopard, to the question Brrd embedded in every installation:
What does resurrection look like when practiced daily, fragment by fragment, in a city that refuses to stop becoming?
The question hangs there, unanswered, pointing beyond the page toward Detroit, toward memory, toward tomorrow's arrangement of what remains.
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Author's Note: Brrd's installations can still be found throughout Detroit, though their locations are no longer documented online. The artist requests that viewers who discover them leave their own small addition—a stone, a leaf, a word written on paper and tucked into the arrangement. This essay is my addition, my fragment offered to the pattern.
