Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE Artist Ryan Mendoza saved Rosa Parks' old Detroit home from demolition by moving it to Germany. Now, he explains why he wants to return the house to America. Video by By Frank Witsil, DFP. Wochit 
 
 Artist Ryan Mendoza poses in front of the rebuilt house of Rosa Parks in Berlin on April 6, 2017. (Photo: Markus Schreiber, Associated Press) 
 
 DETROIT — The American artist who saved a Detroit home that civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived in by moving it to Germany last year now wants to bring it back to Detroit. 
 
 “If you look at the current situation in America, you have all of these monuments to the Confederacy — which are monuments to slavery,” the 45-year-old artist, Ryan Mendoza, said in an interview Sunday with the Detroit Free Press. “There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement, which is antithetical to that.” 
 
 But, Mendoza said, Detroit's cultural institutions, so far, have shown little interest in bringing the house back. Instead, the house may likely end up in a museum or venue elsewhere in the U.S. — such as Washington, D.C., or New York. 
 
 The artist, who lives in Germany, said it is time for Parks' home to return to the U.S. as communities here debate what should happen to Confederate monuments and memorials, and some fear that white nationalism is on the rise. 
 
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 More: Artist brings new beginning for Rosa Parks' Detroit home 
 
 In the aftermath of the deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., and plans for more rallies, there is a sense that moving the home back to America could serve as a reminder of what Parks — and others — went through in their fight for more justice and equality. 
 
 From the beginning, Mendoza said he planned to showcase Parks' rebuilt home in Europe — and then return it to the U.S. 
 
 About a year ago, the dilapidated home on South Deacon Street faced demolition, but its facade was removed so it could be shipped to Europe and refashioned into artwork and put on display in Berlin to give people a more intimate sense of who Parks was. 
 
 Rosa Parks is shown during her 90th birthday celebration with family and friends Feb. 13, 2003, in Detroit. (Photo: Detroit Free Press) 
 
 Parks, a soft-spoken seamstress, became an international civil rights icon after being arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala. 
 
 The bus — No. 2857, which was assigned to the Cleveland Avenue route — has been restored and is now at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. 
 
 “Her memory, her legacy will never die,” Rhea McCauley said last year of Parks, her aunt, as the home facade was being packed up and sent to Mendoza's Berlin studio. “It is an important lesson for the entire country.” 
 
 So far, Mendoza said, one foundation, the Nash Family Foundation, based in New York, has committed up to $40,000 to ship it back to the U.S., and dozens of museums he has contacted have been receptive to his appeals to display it. 
 
 Mendoza said he has spent more than $130,000, much of that from the sale of his other artwork, to disassemble, move and rebuild the small home, which is about 21 feet wide and 21 feet long. He's now working on the home's interior. 
 
 In addition to foundation and museum support, Mendoza said, the vice chancellor of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, who visited the house about a month ago, is helping to champion his efforts to return the house to the U.S. 
 
 Mendoza said the German official even wrote a letter to former first lady Michelle Obama. It is significant that Parks' former Detroit home found a place of honor in a country whose leaders once supported a belief in a master race and practiced genocide. 
 
 Berlin, the German capital, has been the backdrop for important speeches. President John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" address and President Ronald Reagan implored Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," referring to the Berlin Wall. 
 
 There also is a Rosa Parks school in Berlin, as well as a Martin Luther King school and kindergarten. King visited the divided city in 1964, giving speeches to crowds on both sides of the Berlin Wall. 
 
 In Berlin, Mendoza said that the house has been visited by thousands of people, including some American celebrities. 
 
 Rhea McCauley, family member of Rosa Parks, listens to a speaker at an event outside of Rosa Parks' old home in Detroit on Sunday, Sept. 25, 2016. (Photo: Nate Smallwood, Detroit Free Press) 
 
 Parks left the South in 1957 and came to Detroit to stay with family. She first settled at the home on South Deacon Street, McCauley said, adding she was one of 13 children and other relatives who also lived there. 
 
 Parks later moved to a home on Wildemere on the city's west side. In 1994, she was assaulted and robbed by an intruder. She then moved to an apartment in Riverfront Towers in downtown where she lived until her death in 2005. 
 
 In 2010, the Deacon Street home had fallen into disrepair. The city issued a demolition order. 
 
 The Rosa Parks Family Foundation, founded by McCauley, bought the house on South Deacon Street in November 2014 for $500 from the Detroit Land Bank Authority with the hopes of restoring it. 
 
 Mendoza, a painter from New York who moved to Europe at 20, learned about the Parks house through McCauley after he worked on the "The White House" project, in which he dismantled an abandoned house in Detroit and re-created it in Europe as artwork. 
 
 That project, however, also angered some of the people who lived near the home's crumbling remains, which stood for six months after the facade was stripped off. That house, near 8 Mile and Livernois, was eventually demolished. 
 
 Mendoza said the Parks' home is something that should be remembered. 
 
 ”I brought it out of context so it could be made visible,” he said. "As an artist, you have to put a spotlight on something so it can be made visible." 
 
 Contributing: The Associated Press. Follow Frank Witsil on Twitter: @fwitsil 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2xhcSXG ||||| Civil rights activist’s former home was facing demolition as family members were unable to raise funds for its preservation 
 
 The Detroit home of civil rights activist Rosa Parks has been dismantled and moved across the Atlantic by a Berlin-based artist after it faced demolition in its original location. 
 
 The facade of the two-storey building, home to Parks in the 1950s and 60s, was shipped from the US to Germany last month, after having been donated by one of her relatives to Ryan Mendoza, an American artist based in the German capital. 
 
 Members of Parks’ family had in past years repeatedly failed to raise funds for the building’s preservation. 
 
 Rosa Parks: 60th anniversary of a historic day in Alabama – in pictures Read more 
 
 Over the next three months Mendoza will try to reconstruct the building at his studio in Berlin’s Wedding district, after which it could tour galleries around Europe in an attempt to raise awareness of its neglected existence in America. 
 
 “I hope either President Obama or his successor will be sensitive to this issue and catch word of the house that is held hostage across the world: a monument to Rosa Parks’ legacy that was purposely kidnapped in order for America to recognise what it has lost,�? Mendoza told the Guardian. 
 
 The 44-year-old artist said he was evaluating offers from major institutions. “The Tate Modern might be a good place to discuss the state of American affairs with this house as its centrepiece, but I feel eventually the Rosa Parks’ house should be rebuilt on the lawn in front of the White House.�? 
 
 Parks’ refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white person in December 1955 is one of the most famous moments in the history of the modern civil rights movement in America. Her ensuing arrest triggered the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a successful protest campaign against Alabama’s racial segregation policies. 
 
 In 2012 Obama marked the anniversary of Parks’ protest with a picture of himself on the same seat inside the National City Lines bus number 2857, now on display at Detroit’s Henry Ford museum. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Parks’ Detroit home in 1955. Photograph: Rhea McCauley 
 
 Parks moved into the modest three-bedroom house on South Deacon Street in Detroit’s south-west after fleeing Alabama because of the death threats she continued to receive after the end of the boycott. She remained in the city until her death in 2009. Though relatives say she considered her new home a refuge, she remained vocal in her criticism of the city’s housing segregation practices and participated in the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom. 
 
 The house was later sold to a new owner, who was dispossessed after Detroit’s housing bubble burst around 2007-2008. Badly damaged by floods and with pipework missing after break-ins, the property was put on the city’s demolition list until one of its former inhabitants, Parks’ niece Rhea McCauley, bought the house back from the council for $500 (£390). When her parents bought the building in 1956, she said, they had paid $8,000. 
 
 Why I took a family's house from Detroit to Rotterdam Read more 
 
 McCauley approached Mendoza after hearing about a similar project the artist had organised in Detroit. “She loved the city, but I don’t think the city loved her very much back,�? McCauley recently told Detroit Free Press. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.�? 
 
 A New Yorker who has lived and worked in Europe for over 20 years, Mendoza had gained attention in the city for a series of controversial projects. Earlier this year, he moved a family house from Detroit’s low-income 8 Mile Road area into a permanent exhibition at the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In another provocative project, Mendoza restyled two abandoned Detroit homes so that light shining through bullet holes at night displayed the names of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. 
 
 Mendoza’s work brings to mind that of the influential late US artist Mike Kelley, who in 2012 built a faithful mobile replica of his Detroit childhood home. 
 
 Mendoza said he wanted to “make the building into a work of art without violating the building as a document�?. 
 
 
 
 While he described himself as an “imperfect candidate�? for the project and said “it should be somebody in the black community doing this�?, he argued that McCauley and he had had a simple choice between the building being preserved or demolished. The final remains of the house were pulled down at a ceremony attended by the local community, including the last surviving neighbour from Parks’ time. 
 
 McCauley said she hoped young people in Europe would look at the house and let it strengthen their spirit. “If a small little lady can fight for justice until the end of her life, what is wrong with the rest of us?�? ||||| Buy Photo Orlando Corbin, 58, tended to the grounds on Sept. 23, 2016, at a house artist Ryan Mendoza is rebuilding in Europe. Mendoza pays for the upkeep, said Corbin, who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life and remembers Parks visiting her grandparents at the house. (Photo: Joe Guillen, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo 
 
 A Detroit house where civil rights icon Rosa Parks purportedly lived in the late 1950s has been partially deconstructed and shipped to Europe by artist Ryan Mendoza. His previous work in Detroit caused controversy after another home he stripped down was left standing for months as an eyesore. 
 
 Mendoza has the blessing of Parks' niece Rhea McCauley, said Fabia Mendoza, the artist's wife. 
 
 "This project is intended to give worth both to the house Rosa Parks lived in as well as the floor she once walked on," according to an announcement of the home's demolition provided by Mendoza. 
 
 Civil Rights legend Rosa Parks smiles as she is honored at an event commemorating the 1999 Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, Monday, June 14, 1999, at the National Council of Negro Women in Washington, D.C. (Photo: PATRICK D. WITTY/TNS) 
 
 The announcement said Parks and McCauley lived in the home in southwest Detroit from 1957-59. McCauley could not be reached for comment. 
 
 The Rosa Parks Family Foundation, founded by McCauley, bought the house on South Deacon Street in November 2014 for $500 from the Detroit Land Bank Authority with the hopes of restoring it, land bank spokesman Craig Fahle said Friday. 
 
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 The home was blighted, and the city issued a demolition order there in 2010. Fahle said the order was issued as a matter of procedure and the house was not necessarily in the city's demolition pipeline. 
 
 The home's restoration on Detroit soil won't happen at this time. 
 
 Already the house's facade has been removed and its remains are covered by what appears to be a giant white sheet. What's left of the house will be demolished on Monday by ABC Demolition, according to Mendoza. 
 
 McCauley, Ryan Mendoza, who was born in Pennsylvania but has lived in Europe for more than two decades, and others are gathering Sunday at 4 p.m. at the house to discuss the project. 
 
 ► Artist who tore down Detroit home: Trump, Clinton come sleep here 
 
 Pieces of the house are being reconstructed at Mendoza's Berlin studio. Mendoza hopes to showcase the rebuilt house in various European museums before its eventual return to the U.S. 
 
 The process is similar to Mendoza's work on his project known as "The White House" — the deconstruction and re-creation overseas of an abandoned Detroit house. The project angered some neighbors who lived near the home's crumbling remains, which stood for six months after the facade was stripped off. The house near 8 Mile and Livernois was demolished in March. Mendoza said at the time that he had expected it to be torn down earlier, but the demolition company he hired had suspended its work. 
 
 Despite any similarities, the message behind Mendoza's work with the Rosa Parks Family Foundation's house is different than "The White House" project, the latter of which aimed to symbolize the decline of a once-thriving American city. 
 
 "So to be clear, the (Rosa Parks) house is not intended to be restored as a document of blight," Fabia Mendoza wrote in an e-mail. "In this instance the house will not be repainted white. Other than that, what the final house will look like will have to be left to the imagination until Ryan finishes it." 
 
 Orlando Corbin, 58, who lives near the house, said Ryan Mendoza has done a good job of ensuring the property does not become a nuisance. 
 
 Corbin was trimming some shrubs with hand shears on Friday after mowing the lawn. He said Mendoza pays for the upkeep. 
 
 "Even while they were in Europe, they left money for expenses," Corbin said. 
 
 Parks, a seamstress, became an international civil rights icon after she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., an act many considers to be the launch of the Montgomery bus boycott. 
 
 She moved to Detroit in 1957 where she lived with a cousin, according to her longtime friend and caregiver Elaine Steel. Steel said she was not aware that Parks lived at the house, but added, "I did not know Mrs. Parks at that time." 
 
 Parks later moved to a home on Wildemere on the city's west side where in 1994 she was assaulted and robbed by an intruder. She then moved to an apartment in Riverfront Towers in downtown where she lived until her death in 2005. 
 
 Contact Joe Guillen: 313-222-6678 or jguillen@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @joeguillen. 
 
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– Last year, an American artist living in Germany bought Rosa Parks' dilapidated home in Detroit and reassembled it in Berlin as an art project. Now Ryan Mendoza says it's time for the home to return to the US, per the Detroit Free Press. He cites the recent racial violence in Virginia and the rippling effects of the removal of Confederate statues around the US, making the case that Parks' home would provide a powerful counterpoint. "There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement," he tells the Free Press. The big hitch, however, is getting someone, or some institution, to pay for its relocation. Mendoza says that Detroit's cultural institutions don't seem interested, raising the prospect that the home could end up in a museum elsewhere in the country. So far, one group—the Nash Family Foundation in New York—has pledged up to $40,000, but while other institutions have expressed interest in displaying the 21-by-21-foot-long home, actual monetary offers aren't following. Mendoza says he's spent about $130,000 to move and restore the house, though the interior work isn't yet complete. "I'm fond of the house," he tells NBC News, "but this house has to go back to the United States, and now is the time." (The late founder of Little Caesar's quietly paid Parks' rent for years.)