AXD Living X Catalog

LIVING X 22 PROJECTS EXPLORE THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE AND NARRATIVE OF DETROIT AND ITS NEIGHBORHOODS

AXD LIVING X Copyright Š 2020 by rootoftwo Editors: CÊzanne Charles and John Marshall Book Design: Middlecott Design Copy Editor: Mike Lala Cover Photo: Jit the Funk Up and Dance! by Ronald Ford Jr. aka QWNTYM. Photo by Cybelle Codish courtesy The Kresge Foundation Printed by: Printwell Inc., Taylor, MI ISBN: 978-1-7354079-0-6 Additional images courtesy the artists, organizations, and photographers listed in the photo credits.

The works depicted in the images are subject to the intellectual property rights of the artists.

AXD LIVING X 2019-2020 would not have been possible without the generous support of The Kresge Foundation.

rootoftwo and its partners, contributors, and editors reside in Waawiiyaatanong (Detroit) and Washtenong (Ann Arbor) - the ancestral, traditional, contemporary, and future lands of the Anishinaabe people. We would like to specifically acknowledge the elders and people of the Three Fires Confederacy, an enduring Anishinaabe alliance of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations.

LIVING X 22 PROJECTS EXPLORE THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE AND NARRATIVE OF DETROIT AND ITS NEIGHBORHOODS

CONTENTS

From left to right: Michael A Williams (Associate Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation), for rootoftwo: Cézanne Charles (AXD 2019 Curator), Lauren Rossi (Artist Initiatives Manager), Dominique Campbell (AXD Manager).

Photo by Miz Korona

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INTRODUCTION

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THE KRESGE FOUNDATION

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LIVING X

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THE JOURNEY

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MAPPING AXD

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AXD ARTISTS’ PROJECTS: JUNE 2019 - FEBRUARY 2020

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WORKS IN PROGRESS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION AXD is a yearlong, city-wide, multi-disciplinary series featuring 22 newly commissioned exhibitions, performances, and events developed by Kresge Artist Fellows, Gilda Award recipients, and Kresge Eminent Artists immersed throughout Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. AXD explores the changing landscape and narrative of the city and its neighborhoods.

This catalog is a visual reminder of the powerful and engaging work of these artists. The 22 projects were commissioned following an open call to more than 200 Kresge Artist Fellows, Kresge Eminent Artists, and Gilda Award winners from the first decade of the Kresge Arts in Detroit initiative. AXD is curated and managed by rootoftwo and powered by The Kresge Foundation.

ROOTOFTWO rootoftwo, LLC is a research- and practice-driven hybrid design studio led by CĂŠzanne Charles and John Marshall.

Formed in 1998, their work engages in civic future-making, using design methods to facilitate people to imagine and shape collective actions for more just, resilient, inclusive, and adaptive futures. rootoftwo creates innovative and tangible experiences, events, artifacts, spaces, methods, and strategies that allow us to perceive ourselves, the here and now, and the future differently. For more information visit rootoftwo.com THE KRESGE FOUNDATION The Kresge Foundation was founded in 1924 to promote human progress. Today, Kresge fulfills that mission by building and strengthening pathways to opportunity for low-income people in America’s cities, seeking to dismantle structural and systemic barriers to equality and justice. Using a full array of grant, loan, and other investment tools, Kresge invests more than $160 million annually to foster economic and social change. For more information visit kresge.org

Guests at AXD Kick-off Party, August 9, 2019. Photo by Miz Korona 5

THE KRESGE FOUNDATION AXD marks the intersection of two major facets of The Kresge Foundation’s work to revitalize Detroit. It combines our support for individual artists as wellsprings of truth telling and creativity with support for neighborhoods as the heart and soul the city—a bringing together of the energy of art with the grounding of place.

Kresge has long invested in Detroit neighborhoods, and since 2016, we have made explicit—and doubled down on—our belief that the city’s resurgence must be broadly inclusive of neighborhoods and their residents, the city’s heart and soul.

Meanwhile, we have supported Detroit’s evolving arts ecosystem for more than a decade. For us, that means supporting not only arts organizations or artist projects, but moreover supporting artists themselves simply for persevering as artists.Through 22 Gilda Awards of $5,000, 218 Kresge Artist Fellowships of $25,000, and 12 Kresge Eminent Artist Awards, we have boosted the incomes of Metro Detroit artists by more than $6 million—dollars our experience tells us were often sorely needed.

We also supported a platform for many of those artists in the Art X festivals of 2011, 2013, and 2015. Anchored in Midtown, our final festival spanned 10 days and a dozen venues to draw audiences of more than 10,000.

We’ve seen our partners at Creative Many, then rootoftwo, reimagine Art X to connect the energy of Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Award winners not only with audiences in Midtown, but with neighborhoods and residents across the city. Now there are further connections to be made through this volume and the AXD podcast.

Make no mistake: we need these connections and what can grow from them—conversations, debate, fresh thinking, iterative art-making, and collaborations—as urgently as ever.

This is the time for us to redouble our commitment to make Detroit a more equitable city for all of its residents. Artists have a key role in this struggle, including at the intersections marked by the X. Wendy Lewis Jackson, Managing Director, Detroit Program The Kresge Foundation

Guests at AXD Kick-off Party, August 9, 2019. Photo by Miz Korona 7

LIVING X Living X explores the significance, ambiguity, upheaval, and uncertainty of this contemporary moment. In 2019, we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Kresge Arts in Detroit initiative. During this same 10-year period, Detroit has undergone significant transformation. There are many positives and pieces of evidence of the resilience of this place through the everyday brilliance and determination of its people. Still, we know the recovery remains uneven and elusive for many residents. Living X is about now, our recent and distant past, and the yet-tobe-envisioned future. ‘X’ is a variable used to represent an unknown value. Every day we watch, participate, and shape the stuff of future history. We are living in times that are seemingly without precedent. And yet, artists in this city, at this very moment, are crafting unimagined futures; uplifting lives sung and unsung from our collective past; giving meaning, clarity, and activism to our present; and, more than anything, finding and feeding the joy and humanity that runs through this city. The 22 projects selected here examine what it means to live and create in these undefined times: the ‘X’.

AXD LIVING X PODCAST Hosted by Ryan Myers-Johnson, executive director of Sidewalk Detroit, the Living X Podcast features the voices of AXD artists and partners reflecting on their projects and the many ways that artists, culture bearers, and creative practitioners are shaping a more equitable future for themselves and Detroit. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or visit artxdetroit.com/listen-now.

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THE JOURNEY With support from The Kresge Foundation, the 2019–2020 edition of AXD began its life at Creative Many Michigan, a Detroit-based statewide creative development organization. As a program within its creative industries portfolio, AXD empowers the place-based practices of artists, culture bearers, and creative practitioners within the cities of Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. AXD provides commissioning grants, professional and technical support, and promotional opportunities open to Kresge Artist Fellows, Eminent Artists, and Gilda Award recipients in recognition of the 10-year anniversary of the Kresge Arts in Detroit initiative.

I am grateful to the local and national curatorial advisory panelists who came together to recommend projects from the open call and their contributions to the Living X theme. In April of 2019, Creative Many Michigan notified the artists of their awards. In May 2019, Creative Many Michigan announced it would cease its operations

by June 30, 2019. Upheaval and uncertainty, key themes of Living X, were suddenly and consequentially manifesting in the present. The management and curation of AXD was transferred to rootoftwo in July 2019.

I’d like to say we didn’t skip a beat—that there were no hiccups. Plans, ideas, timelines, and expectations all shifted. Collectively, we found new reserves and sources of support, and the artists got on with things—with patience, humor, brilliance, and some gentle, deserved nudges to our team. We send our gratitude and thanks to the participating artists, venues, and partners. I also cannot thank my co-conspirators at rootoftwo enough: AXD Manager Dominique Campbell, Artist Initiatives Manager Lauren Rossi, and Partner and Co-Editor John Marshall.

We also thank The Kresge Foundation for their fearless and tireless work on this program.

This catalog and the accompanying AXD podcast got started in March 2020 just as Michigan, most of the country, and the rest of the world went into lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As final texts were edited and episodes recorded, people took to the streets in response to centuries of systemic and structural oppression of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. This is a moment of reckoning, where community-based movements are working resolutely to demand and deliver progressive social transformation.

In this spirit I recall the words of Toni Morrison in a 2015 essay for The Nation.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.1 Toni Morrison, rest in power Cézanne Charles Curator, AXD Living X, 2019-2020 Partner, rootoftwo

1 Morrison, Tony. “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear.” The Nation (April 6, 2015): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/ 9

MAPPING AXD OF THE PROJECTS THAT TOOK PLACE IN DETROIT, HAMTRAMCK, HIGHLAND PARK AND BEYOND FROM JUNE 7, 2019 TO FEBRUARY 4, 2020

OUR VOICES FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS EMILIO RODRIGUEZ AND BLACK AND BROWN THEATRE P14 1 17525 Wyoming Ave, Detroit, MI 48221 2 5161 Charles St, Detroit, MI 48212 3 2357 Caniff St, Hamtramck, MI 48212 FLY | DROWN JENNIFER HARGE AND TAYLOR ALDRIDGE P16 4 4719 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201 FREEDOM SCHOOL THE TETRA, SHERINA SHARPE, CHACE MORRIS (MIC WRITE), AND CHI AMEN-RA P18 5 2900 E Grand Blvd, Detroit, MI 48202 6 19359 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48221 CASS CORRIDOR ART & BEYOND, 1967–2020 BOB SESTOK P20 7 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201 8 39221 Woodward Ave, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304 BEAUTIFUL PLACES/FREEDOM SPACES AISHA ELLIS P22 9 24 Avalon St, Highland Park, MI 48203 THE FIREFIGHTERS CARRIE MORRIS P24 10 2221 Carpenter Ave, Detroit, MI 48212 10

FREEWAYS AND SIDESTREETS THE HINTERLANDS P26 11 12657 Moran St, Detroit, MI 48212

AQUATIC MESSAGING SENGHOR REID P38 19 8420 W McNichols Rd, Detroit, MI 48221

HIGHLAND PARK: CITY OF OGUN MARION HAYDEN P28 12 180 Victor St, Highland Park, MI 48203

JIT THE FUNK UP AND DANCE! RON FORD JR. AKA QWNTYM P40 20 111 E Kirby St, Detroit, MI 48202

SPIRIT PLATE SACRAMENTO KNOXX, GIIZHIGAD, KAZZY THE GYPSY, RAYCHEL GAFFORD, AND THE AADIZOOKAAN (ADZKN) P30 13 3503 Cicotte St, Detroit, MI 48210 14 3439 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48210 15 1211 Trumbull Ave, Detroit, MI 48216

THE DETROITIST MARSHA MUSIC P42 21 19359 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48221 MARRATEIN, MARRATEIN JULIA YEZBICK P44 22 13624 Michigan Ave, Dearborn, MI 48126

DETROIT: TWENTY MINUTES APART ROBERT B. JONES SR. AND MATT WATROBA P32 16 1401 Broadway St, Detroit, MI 48226

NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE EDGE SHAUN S. NETHERCOTT P46 23 2835 Bagley Street Detroit, MI, 48216

PHANTOM DETROIT RICK ROBINSON AND THE URBAN REQUIEM PROJECT P34 17 8850 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48202

DANCES FROM THE STATE OF VERACRUZ LANCE RODRIGUEZ AND BALLET FOLKLÓRICO DE DETROIT P48 24 6424 Michigan Ave, Detroit, MI 48210

MATRIX X DETROIT PAMELA WISE P36 18 7625 Linwood St, Detroit, MI 48206

RAISING CARLITO NATASHA MILLER P50 25 8640 La Salle Blvd, Detroit, MI 48206

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6.4 miles out Michigan Ave

Map by Geoff Boeing 11

AXD ARTISTS’ PROJECTS JUNE 2019 TO FEBRUARY 2020

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OUR VOICES FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS EMILIO RODRIGUEZ 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LIVE ARTS

BLACK AND BROWN THEATRE DATE: June 7, 2019 PARTNER: Samuel C. Mumford High School LOCATION: 17525 Wyoming Ave, Detroit, MI 48221 DATE: June 29, 2019 PARTNER: GEE White Academy LOCATION: 5161 Charles St, Detroit, MI 48212 COMMUNITY VENUE/PARTNER: Planet Ant Theatre LOCATION: 2357 Caniff St, Hamtramck, MI 48212

Culture, community, and education connect through Black and Brown Theatre’s Our Voices Festival of New Plays.

This festival supports students in writing and directing short plays relevant to their own experiences, then realizing productions performed by Black and Brown Theatre’s growing database of diverse talent. The plays are performed in both school and community contexts to reach students’ peers, parents, teachers, administrators and the broader communities of Northwest Detroit and Hamtramck. This youth-driven approach helps build skills and confidence, validating students’ experiences and perspectives. Developed by award-winning playwright and educator Emilio Rodriguez, Our Voices empowers students as leaders to tell the stories of their neighborhoods, aspirations, and the issues important to their lives.

The power of storytelling and performance provides Detroiters an opportunity to reclaim their city, to fight harmful media narratives and displacement from their communities. Our Voices reinstates community voices as a vital part of the city’s cultural landscape and provides Detroit’s youth with meaningful relationships and mentorship, illustrating how resilience and hard work can combine to showcase the everyday brilliance of Detroiters.

EMILIO RODRIGUEZ is a playwright whose works tell the untold stories of underrepresented audiences. Focusing on a Latinx experience, Emilio creates a wide range of characters, from college students and teenagers in coming-of-age stories, to animals like sea lions. Emilio is the artistic director of Black and Brown Theatre.

BLACK AND BROWN THEATRE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit theater that celebrates the voices of people of color onstage, backstage, and beyond the stage. Since its formation in 2016, Black and Brown Theatre has produced stage plays, workshops, and special projects for people of all ages. Black and Brown Theatre maintains a free digital database of actors of color in the Detroit area for local directors to cast stage plays, films, and other acting projects.

Photos by: Left page left:Â Evan Lo Left page right: Juli Lindsey This page top left: Juli Lindsey This page top right and bottom: Evan Lo Courtesy of Black and Brown Theatre

Our Voices Festival of New Plays is not only important, but fundamental in our present climate. It brings people of different ages, experiences, values, cultures, races, and beliefs together to create a palpable experience that encourages community participation.

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The Great Migration was not a voluntary movement to northern and western states; it was prompted by white supremacist violence toward the descendants of enslaved Africans. We see this history as an indicator and correlative of contemporary violences toward Black Americans, and the grieving practices of Black Americans today as historically rooted in this lineage. FLY | DROWN animates the precarity of Black life while highlighting how Black domestic spaces have served as sites of reclamation and refuge despite prolific state and state-sanctioned violence and surveillance.

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FLY | DROWN JENNIFER HARGE 2017 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, VISUAL ARTS

TAYLOR ALDRIDGE 2017 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LITERARY ARTS DATE: September 13, 2019–October 19, 2019 PARTNER: Detroit Artists Market LOCATION: 4719 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201

FLY | DROWN is a month-long installation at the Detroit Artists Market that includes a series of performances, workshops, salon talks, and meals showcasing the ways Black domestic spaces provide sites for Black womxn to exercise acts of pleasure and self-sovereignty. The

Photos by: Left page: Cybelle Codish courtesy of The Kresge Foundation This page: Miz Korona

exhibition simulates Harge’s grandparents’ home in Highland Park, MI where they landed after traveling north during the Great Migration. Audiences sit in a living room on household furniture installed throughout the gallery to witness Harge’s choreography, becoming participants in the space and invited guests into the home.

FLY | DROWN uses historical Black migration routes as points of departure from which to invoke the lineages of Black domestic spaces in the Midwest and gesture toward practices that both honor and queer our ancestral legacies. Aldridge and Harge invite scholars, friends, family members, and other artists to illuminate the personal and communal vernaculars of historical Black interiors.

The project celebrates the often modest but ritualized site of refuge that belonged and belongs to African Americans that migrated directly from the American South or have ties to those migration routes.

Black Americans activated these spaces while simultaneously working to reclaim their own bodies after Jim Crow, reconstruction, and chattel slavery.

FLY | DROWN suggests that the memories embedded in the artifacts and architectures of historical Black domestic spaces enable fellowship, grieving, archiving, and the embodiment of queer genealogy.

JENNIFER HARGE is a Detroit-based educator and movement artist. Her physical syntax embodies an ever-changing relationship to gravity, Blackness, and a teetering between surviving and thriving. Her creative research is committed to Black and queer vernacular gestures, codes, and rituals as ways of writing from and exploring histories that have been misnamed or gone unnoticed. In 2014, she founded Harge Dance Stories to create a movement and performance platform centering Black subjectivity. Harge has been recognized by various institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Washington National Cathedral, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Queer|Art, the University of Michigan, Duke University, and Wayne State University..

TAYLOR RENEE ALDRIDGE is a writer and independent curator. In 2015, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Taylor has held a curatorial position at the Detroit Institute of Arts and has worked with the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, and The National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution). She is a 2016 recipient of The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing. Taylor has written for Art21, ARTNews, Contemporary And, Detroit MetroTimes, SFMoMA’s Open Space, and Hyperallergic.

She received her MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and her BA from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.

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FREEDOM SCHOOL

Photos by Trista Dymond courtesy of The TETRA

THE TETRA SHERINA SHARPE 2014 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & THEATRE

CHACE MORRIS (MIC WRITE) 2013 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LITERARY ARTS

CHI AMEN-RA 2016 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC DATE: August 17, 2019 PARTNER: The Jam Handy LOCATION: 2900 E Grand Blvd, Detroit, MI 48202 DATE: December 29, 2019 PARTNER: Detroit Fiber Works LOCATION: 19359 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48221

Think back to your time in school. Outside test scores & grades, can you honestly say it prepared you emotionally for an adulthood in the crosshairs of toxic systems? Did school walk you through that major loss in your life? Did your classes prepare you for seething anger or growing numbness? Where the hell are those classes?

Freedom School is a large-scale community performance ritual in Detroit. Combining ancestral spirit work with modern Black and Brown spiritual technologies, The TETRA leads participants to sing, conjure, stomp, write, and shout their way through a night of 20 rituals. Liberation is as much an energetic fight as a physical one.

Oppression is designed to keep communities of color stuck in lower vibrations. Freedom School explores each emotion, from shame to enlightenment, to create methods for how to unstick, safely feel, and freely move between them. Freedom School weaves lyric poetry, rap as interactive spell work (shadow choir), Afro-Caribbean drumming, and visual art installations into an experience described by audiences as an “initiation.”

THE TETRA is the Underground, an open secret for lion-hearted people looking to be free. Freedom is the art of becoming your highest self. This is a journey of rituals, ancestral technologies, and spirit work performed to activate a radical remembering that healing and wholeness are our birthrights. Here, we imagine a world beyond oppression and survival. Here, we not only thrive. We sing, dance, drum, and question into the storm until we become our own promised land.

SHERINA RODRIGUEZ SHARPE is a writer, editor, performer & educator from Detroit, MI. She is a 2018 MAP grant awardee, a 2017 Knight Arts Challenge awardee, a 2014 Cave Canem fellow, a 2013 Voices of Our Nations Authors alum, and executive director of Obsidian Blues. Sherina is a universe-bender. Her writing investigates and confronts the cultural intersections of class, gender, race, and religion.

CHACE MORRIS (MIC WRITE) is a poet/emcee from Detroit. Chace is a recipient of a 2018 MAP Fund grant, two Knight Arts Challenge Awards, and a 2016 Alain Locke Award from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Chace is a Callaloo Fellow and was twice recognized as a Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion. His poems have been published in The Offing, Wildness, Muzzle, and Radius and his music has been featured on NPR, The Village Voice, Detroit Free Press, Mother Jones, and NBC’s The Grio.

CHI AMEN-RA Chinelo ‘Chi’ Amen-Ra is a percussionist focusing on rhythms of the African Diaspora. He was born into the Ngoma Za Amen-Ra Dance Theatre of Detroit, which sparked a lifelong interest in various drums. Chi has performed at the Super Bowl XL and with renowned artists from both America (opened for Talib Kweli) and Africa (Sulley Imoro). Chi holds a BA in African Studies from the University of Michigan.

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We time travel and globe-trot to reclaim the stories of resiliency that our history books have erased. We use ritual to compose a new ending to our stories and celebrate our thrival.

Freedom School activates community imagination as our people’s primary power source for transcendence, not policy.

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Photos by Montez Miller courtesy of The Kresge Foundation

CASS CORRIDOR ART & BEYOND, 1967–2020 BOB SESTOK 2017 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, VISUAL ARTS DATE: September 6, 2019 PARTNER: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit LOCATION: 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201 DATE: February 4, 2020 PARTNER: Cranbrook Art Museum deSalle Auditorium LOCATION: 39221 Woodward Ave, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304

Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood is changing. Detroit is changing. We face an uncertain future. As the City of Detroit displaces people, demolishes buildings, reroutes streets, and renames districts, how do we remember and tell the important, everyday stories of those places before they are lost? The Cass Corridor was once home to a vibrant art community whose impact extended beyond the city and reverberates to this day. Cass Corridor Art & Beyond tells the stories of a half-century of Cass Corridor artists, their importance, and the nuances and intricacies of their artmaking.

Narrated by Bob Sestok, this live storytelling event uses photos, slides, and videos taken by Cass Corridor artists, providing an intimate portrait of this artistic community and their collaborative exchanges. As a movement, Cass Corridor artists democratized artmaking, deconstructing and abstracting the humble materials and detritus of the city to produce works that often transcended genres and disciplines. Accompanied by live ambient musician John Duffy, Cass Corridor Art & Beyond engages audiences with stranger-than-fiction first-person stories from one of the seminal cultural movements in Detroit’s history. This event also serves as an important opportunity to collect and preserve a historically significant archive of materials, re-presenting and contextualizing it for future generations.

ROBERT SESTOK is a sculptor, painter and printmaker who has worked in Detroit’s Cass Corridor since 1967.

Together with other Cass Corridor artists, Sestok sought new forms and methods of artistic expression, using non-standard materials in response to civil rights struggles, the anti-war movement, and the pervasiveness of the automotive industry in Detroit. In 2015, he opened City Sculpture, a permanent public art space in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood that exhibits three decades of sculptural work.

Sestok’s work is in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, and Wayne State University, among others. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Cranbrook Museum of Art, College for Creative Studies, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Marianne Boesky Gallery. He is the recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Detroit is on the cusp of extraordinary changes. It makes sense to preserve the city’s history before its nuances are lost. It seems important to share the city’s artistic legacy, to say that life was not easy, that the art we made could only have come from this place and that moment in time. This history has much to offer the present and the future—for our city and humanity.

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BEAUTIFUL PLACES/FREEDOM SPACES AISHA ELLIS 2018 GILDA AWARD RECIPIENT, FILM & MUSIC DATE: September 21, 2019 PARTNER: Jakobi Ra Park LOCATION: 24 Avalon St, Highland Park, MI 48203

Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces ccombines live music, spoken word, and visual arts to focus on resilience and healing from racialized environmental injustice. This project expands on a 2018 jam session series developed

by Ellis and held at community-led, revitalized green spaces in Detroit and Highland Park neighborhoods. Like the original series, Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces uplifts the vital spirit of places that suffered from sustained disinvestment in their people and communal bonds. Ellis’s art is a powerful form of therapy that encourages audiences to move past the many intersectional traumas stemming from racialized disparities in access and outcomes.

Coming together at Jakobi Ra Park in Avalon Village, participants develop the personal and communal skills to combat water and food insecurity through practical, hands-on demonstrations. Black and Brown communities in Detroit disproportionately bear the brunt of harmful environmental policies—water shutoffs, lack of access to clean water, pollution, and industrial waste. The demonstrations include survival techniques like water collection and filtration, gardening, and using solar energy to power small devices.

Ellis’s work uses music and spoken word as a means of healing, therapy and renewal aligned with the spaces and work of partner organization Avalon Village. Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces looks at our society’s ills through the lens of live music and asks us to consider what it means to thrive in the present and into the near future.

AISHA ELLIS, hailing from Detroit, is a drummer, percussionist, and more. As of 2017, she is the recording and performing drummer for international recording artist Les Nubians and Mahogany Jones. She has been the co-drummer and recently the percussionist for Jessica Care Moore’s “Black Women Rock” for the past several years. She is affectionately known as Drumlova or Time Keepa and was the drummer for the Detroit based hip-hop band YiN, which was the offspring of all female band Lola Valley. For the past three years, she has been the drummer for Mollywop, a Detroit-based multi-genre band.

Photos by Miz Korona 22

I decided to dig deeper, to tell a story that uplifts the positive transformations in our neighborhoods. To skill-share and collectively build the means to address the adversity that persists in vulnerable communities throughout the city. I believe that the arts can help us persevere and mobilize, and to envision and move forward toward greater well-being in our lives.

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Documenting and sharing these experiences over time provides commentary on the changes in the city between 2013–2019. This project connects the daily toll of managing fires in Detroit’s vacancies to a larger problem of municipal oversight. Under-resourced civic employees are only one result of systematic policies—like segregation and general disinvestment—that desperately need to be overhauled.

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THE FIREFIGHTERS CARRIE MORRIS 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LIVE ARTS DATE: October 12-13, 2019 PARTNER: Carrie Morris Arts Production LOCATION: 2221 Carpenter Ave, Detroit, MI 48212

Set to audio interviews collected over the past six years, The Firefighters is a contemporary puppet performance illustrating the effects that redlining and disinvestment in Detroit neighborhoods have had on the physical bodies and mental health of its firefighters.

Since 2013, Carrie Morris has interviewed firefighters across Detroit to understand what it means to work within a landscape recovering from decades of neglect. These stories are emotional, funny, harrowing, and visceral. In The Firefighters, we learn of a new cadet who spent six months recovering from a building collapse and a fire chief who served 30 years on the force, but received a delayed diagnosis of pancreatic cancer because he did not have health care.

The work gives form to these stories through spoken dialogue and pre-recorded audio narratives, using bunraku-style puppets, shadow puppets, large-scale props, and hand-painted miniatures of neighborhoods. In a city whose infrastructure is currently being “redeveloped,” these stories inspire discussions about where resources should be allocated, whose lives are worth investing in, and how those investments should take place. The examination of these works in miniature gives audiences an opportunity to participate in large-scale change.

CARRIE MORRIS is a director and puppeteer who choreographs handmade objects to tell stories. The plays she stages are well-researched, involve multiple performers, and typically designed for adult audiences. Her works can be large scale (using life-sized elephant puppets) or small scale (3” silhouettes). In her performances, puppets are representations of bodies whose stories require clarity, urgency, and care to transmit.

Carrie is interested in performance that includes multimedia elements, performing objects, and performance in experimental spaces. She was a Fulbright grantee in the field of performance art for multimedia shadow puppetry in Indonesia. Her creative work has been seen at NYC Fringe Festival, Detroit Institute of Art, Seattle’s Annex Theater, Detroit’s DLECTRICITY, and as a guest artist with the Grand Rapids Symphony. Her work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Morris holds a BFA in directing from NYU and an MFA in studio art from the University of Michigan. She is the director of Carrie Morris Arts Production (CMAP), an intimate performance space and forum for puppetry and theater in Detroit.

Photos by Miz Korona 25

We set the piece where we live and work, where there are so many stories and dreams that exist behind what is easily seen. We had to be articulate and gentle in our work— it’s sometimes a bit wacky—with people in our community who know us as neighbors and customers, but not as artists. We love this place.

Freeways and Sidestreets is social, internet-y, weird, and sweet, and reflects the richness and complexity of our neighborhood.

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FREEWAYS AND SIDESTREETS THE HINTERLANDS 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOWS, LIVE ARTS DATE: October 12–13, 2019 PARTNER: Play House and Power House Productions LOCATION: 12657 Moran St, Detroit, MI 48212

Freeways and Sidestreets is a daylong performance event taking place along Conant Street between the Davison Freeway and I-94, at Play House, and online, exploring the myriad of ways this tiny commercial corridor straddling Detroit and Hamtramck ties into and parallels places, communities, and imaginations around the globe. Working with residents, artists, and businesses on Conant, along with their international counterparts, The Hinterlands uses live-streaming, theatrical actions, and one-on-one conversations to explore how hyper-local stories can connect with global audiences.

Blending their signature genre-busting style of theater with internet art and participatory performance, Freeways and Sidestreets consists of five “acts” ranging wildly in style, from playful to meditative. Each of these acts reveals hidden aspects of Conant and how these different layers reflect across the globe. The project pairs philosophers in Hamtramck and Moscow for a psycho-geographic stroll through Conant’s alleys; examines the GM Hamtramck Assembly plant via an on-site puppet lecture, with a response from Chinese synth manufacturer Meng Qi; and brings together two restaurants for a bi-national coffee hour—one on Conant and another in Pristina, Kosovo.

Freeways and Sidestreets makes the ties that bind one small geographic space with others across the globe visible, delving into the idiosyncrasies of one neighborhood to learn something profound about another community and ourselves. The event builds off four years of publicly engaged work by The Hinterlands, collaborating with partners old and new in a celebration of this unique neighborhood.

THE HINTERLANDS is a Detroit-based company creating performances and public events that are highly irrational and deeply American. From their original touring pieces to the events they curate in their Detroit neighborhood, their work is built around pressing into the unknown areas of personal and collective history with fearless physicality and a sense of humor. Formed in 2009 by Richard Newman and Liza Bielby, their performances smash seemingly disparate images and ideas together, culminating in new, highly layered meanings that are greater than the sum of their parts. Their work has been seen at the Shanghai Biennale, the Berlinale, Alverno Presents, Flynn Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Charlestown Working Theater, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among others. The Hinterlands are the artists-in-residents and program curators of Play House, a Detroit neighborhoodbased performance space in collaboration with Power House Productions.

LIZA BIELBY (co-director) is a former Fulbright scholar, a student of the Sichuan Chuanju Academy (now Sichuan Vocational College of Art), a graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, a board member of the Bangla School of Music, and a professor of movement at Wayne State University’s Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance.

Photos by Sarah Nesbitt courtesy of The Hinterlands

RICHARD NEWMAN (co-director) has led workshops and trainings at universities and theaters around the world, and has performed abroad in China, Spain, Poland, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Canada. He was an ensemble member of Double Edge Theatre from 2004–2008 and an artist in residence with The Dell’Arte Company in Blue Lake, CA. 27

HIGHLAND PARK: CITY OF OGUN MARION HAYDEN 2016 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC DATE: October 20, 2019 PARTNER: Smith Shop LOCATION: 180 Victor St, Highland Park, MI 48203

Highland Park: City of Ogun is a six-part musical composition that explores how Highland Park has changed through the lives and stories of its residents.

Hayden interviewed community members during the Highland Park Music Festival, gathering the memories and narratives of different generations into a digital archive. Community memory is ephemeral; as we lose people through aging and displacement, the preservation of their stories increases in importance. Highland Park: City of Ogun preserves and protects these stories at a pivotal point in history by interweaving excerpts from these narratives as lyrics, improvisational themes, and word-scapes into a new musical composition.

The voice of the people serves as the centerpiece of Highland Park: City of Ogun. The fabric of this community is threadbare because of prolonged disinvestment in education, jobs, housing, infrastructure, services, and amenities, yet its people remain resilient. The collective memory and bonds of its residents, their connections to the neighborhood, schools, churches, businesses provide a foundation for renewal. Attracting audiences from Highland Park and Detroit to Smith Shop, the project culminates in a musical performance and celebration that centers and amplifies the voice of the community.

MARION HAYDEN is one of the nation’s finest proponents of the acoustic bass. Hayden is part of Detroit’s great jazz legacy, and was mentored by trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, pianist and composer Kenn Cox, and saxophonists Wendell Harrison, Donald Walden, and Charles Gabriel. She is co-founder of the groundbreaking women-led jazz ensemble Straight Ahead. Hayden has performed with Geri Allen, Bobby McFerrin, Regina Carter, Steve Turre, and Nancy Wilson.

As an artist, Hayden works in the areas of jazz and creative improvisation, informed by the Black music traditions of gospel, blues and R&B. Her compositions are narrative driven and include work on the poet Phyllis Wheatley, the biblical book of Ruth, and a Solo Bass Score for “Eulogy for Detroit 1967” by poet Melba Joyce Boyd. She holds teaching positions at the University of Michigan, Oakland University, Michigan State University, and the Detroit Jazz Festival.

Photos by Miz Korona 28

Ogun is a protector god associated with iron and fire in many African religions. The traditional deity of blacksmiths, technologists, and drivers, Ogun is a perfect symbol for Highland Park.

By delving deeply into the narratives of the people interviewed, I found threads of commonality and uniqueness. The people of Highland Park are the living history, bearing witness to the past and ready to shape the future. This project is my musical weaving of their stories.

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SPIRIT PLATE SACRAMENTO KNOXX 2015 GILDA AWARD RECIPIENT

GIIZHIGAD KAZZY THE GYPSY RAYCHEL GAFFORD THE AADIZOOKAAN (ADZKN) DATES: October 31–November 6, 2019 PARTNER: ADZKN Headquarters LOCATION: 3503 Cicotte St, Detroit, MI 48210 PARTNER: Garage Cultural LOCATION: 3439 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48210 PARTNER: Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation LOCATION: 1211 Trumbull Ave, Detroit, MI 48216

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Spirit Plate is an immersive storytelling experience that uplifts the ancestral technologies of the people and the land here in Waawiiyaatanong (Detroit). Organized during Día de Muertos and the autumn Ghost Supper, the project uplifts and holds space for the indigenous cultural traditions of Mexico and the Anishinaabe.

Unfolding over seven days, it features communal learning journeys, conversations, open studio events, and meals that culminate in a powerful live music performance of Spirit Plate.

The Mighty Children (Day 1) holds space for neighborhood youth to actively engage with indigenous cultural knowledge systems through music production, experimenting with and exploring sounds, live group performances, and recording.

Honor Songs (Day 2) is an intentional space for adults to learn about the teachings of honor songs and to play music that reminds us of our ancestors.

This day focuses on conversations with deeply rooted community members to feature and uplift their incredible work within their communities. Conversations are recorded as podcasts and are accompanied by live calavera style make-up sessions and Día de Muertos teachings.

The Spirit Plate (Day 3) combines music, video/ moving images, and dancing to honor and remember the ancestors by bringing their stories into an active present and to help shape our future. Guided by the original indigenous culture and sounds from Anishinaabe and Detroit techno, ghettotech, hip-hop, soul, and grit, a contemporary medicine bundle containing a 2LP vinyl record and additional gifts are activated during the experience.

SACRAMENTO KNOXX is an interdisciplinary artist with strong roots in Southwest Detroit. Knoxx blends traditional and contemporary music and sonic styles to create dynamic storytelling experiences. Through live music performances, dancing, and video projections, he takes audiences on a resonant, participatory journey to assemble the worlds we want to live in.

GIIZHIGAD is an Anishinaabe artist and cultural worker rooted in Southwest Detroit. She currently builds creatively and collaboratively with The Aadizookaan in the facets of music, dance, photography, film, and mixed media design as a part of dynamic storytelling installations alchemizing the worlds we want to live in.

KAZZY THE GYPSY is an experimental hip-hop artist and musician. He combines elements of rap, jazz, alternative rock, and rhythm and blues that uplifts the cultural legacy of Detroit.

RAYCHEL GAFFORD is a Southwest Detroit native who engages people to tap into their innate ability to create healing and feed their inner fire through dynamic storytelling, poetry, and art.

THE AADIZOOKAAN (ADZKN) seeks wisdom from indigenous, ancestral knowledge systems toward cultural production and storytelling through contemporary, experimental, and traditional film, music, media, and design.

Photos by: Left page:Â Montez Miller courtesy of The Kresge Foundation This page top left: Montez Miller courtesy of The Kresge Foundation This page bottom and right: Miz Korona

This is a pivotal moment for families and communities to build ways to live well together amidst the challenging landscape of Turtle Island. Using our collective imagination to address and relieve the symptoms of oppression, Spirit Plate compels us to reach for liberation and transformation in Waawiiyaatanong (where the land & river bends).

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Music and stories teach us to speak truth to power.

Those who control the story control the narrative. Detroit: Twenty Minutes Apart explores the last fifty years of Detroit’s struggles. Through storytelling, art, and music, we confront difficult and complex issues. Our message is that through genuine conversation we can build lasting, positive change between Detroit and her suburbs.

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DETROIT: TWENTY MINUTES APART ROBERT B. JONES SR. 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC

MATT WATROBA DATE: November 14, 2019 PARTNER: Boll Family YMCA LOCATION: 1401 Broadway St, Detroit, MI 48226

Detroit: Twenty Minutes Apart is a stage presentation that explores the neighborhood, family, and musical experiences of two musicians that grew up in very different neighborhoods, 20 minutes apart. One grew up in Detroit and the other in Plymouth, but they found commonality in art and music, forging a 30-year friendship.

The program includes both popular and original songs that shaped their experiences growing up in Detroit with stories woven throughout. Archival photos and film join with personal family photos to chronicle the gentrification of one neighborhood and the neardestruction of the other.

Performed over two parts, the program begins with contrasting experiences of growing up in Detroit and Plymouth, Michigan, focusing on family attitudes about race and experiences with police, drugs, worship, baseball, love, and diversity. It ends with Detroit’s 1967 Rebellion and the aftermath of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations. The second part of the program is set 20 years later, as Robert and Matt start families and work to establish careers as professional musicians. Detroit: Twenty Minutes Apart explores how art and music affected their lives and development, and how they eventually came to meet and find partnership in American Roots music.

ROBERT B. JONES SR. is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist celebrating the history, humor, and power of American Roots music. He has been featured at blues and folk venues and festivals in the US, Canada, and Europe. Robert is also a nationally recognized storyteller and published writer, contributing to essay collections and appearing at the National Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN. As an educator, Robert has performed his American Roots Music in Education (ARMIE) presentations for over 250,000 students over the past 30 years. He has pastored the Sweet Kingdom Missionary Baptist Church on Detroit’s East Side for 15 years. Robert is the co-founder, along with Matt Watroba, of Common Chords, a nonprofit program that builds bridges between communities using music, storytelling, and art.

MATT WATROBA is a community singer, song leader, performer, radio host, songwriter, and educator. Matt is the producer and host of the WDET-Detroit Public Radio Folks Like Us program, the nationally syndicated Sing Out! Radio Magazine, and Folk Alley. This has helped shape a repertoire and presentation that is unique on stages across the state and country. He is committed to inspiring the world to sing, one town at a time. In 2019, Matt was inducted into the Folk DJ Hall of Fame at the Folk Alliance International conference in Montreal. Matt holds a BA in English Language & Literature, with a minor in Communication, Media, & Theatre Arts, from Eastern Michigan University.

Photos by Cybelle Codish courtesy of The Kresge Foundation 33

Even long-term residents and native Detroiters feel like strangers in their own city. We use art, music, and spoken word to uplift their voices. Our work bridges cultural divides and offers meaningful opportunities to listen and make common cause with one another without an agenda.

Photos by Cybelle Codish courtesy of The Kresge Foundation 34

PHANTOM DETROIT RICK ROBINSON 2010 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, PERFORMING ARTS

THE URBAN REQUIEM PROJECT DATE: November 15, 2019 PARTNER: St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church LOCATION: 8850 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48202

Phantom Detroit is a new, 30-minute dramatic work that blends strings, rhythm, gospel singers, street poets, narration, video projections, and a free-standing mosaic to confront the specter of racial and economic disparity in Detroit. Rick Robinson and The Urban Requiem Project collaborate to premier this new work that moves organically between classical, jazz, gospel, rock, Broadway, and funk musical styles. Music combines with poetry to produce an ambitious, large-scale work that bridges cultures and centers the experience of longtime and native Detroiters.

Phantom Detroit premieres at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church. Affectionately known as “Matty-Joe’s Church,” St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s has been literally and spiritually feeding Detroiters and the North End for decades. This new performance work offers a different sort of nourishment for audiences hungry to address the oppressive dynamics playing out in Detroit’s uneven recovery. How can we help reconcile the stark disparities present in this moment of renewal? What kind of future can we imagine and communicate that honors the needs of long-term residents and newcomers? This work allows us to reframe and reimagine, if only for a moment, what an equitable recovery would be, harnessing the spirit of Detroit’s people and giving voice to their plight.

RICK ROBINSON blazes new pathways into classical music for listeners and new inroads for orchestras into communities. He is a composer, bassist, and former Detroit Symphony Orchestra musician. In 1995, Robinson began arranging a hundred symphonic, classical, and jazz masterworks for two unique outreach groups of DSO musicians called CutTime Productions. Robinson’s composing abilities flourished, and in 2006, his original work Essay After Sibelius was premiered by DSO. Robinson has since composed over a dozen works that blend classical with urban dance and folk idioms, including Latin and gospel.

THE URBAN REQUIEM PROJECT tells the story of industrial Detroit through musical composition, spoken word performance, and digital media. The Requiem engages, enlightens, and entertains while exploring the epic saga of the life and death of industrial Detroit. The Urban Requiem Project weaves together stories beginning with the dawn of the auto industry and the Great Migration, recalling the Purple Gang and Young Boys Incorporated. They relay memories of the 1967 Rebellion and white flight, the labor movement and civil rights, and Motown’s legacy of music to show how industrial Detroit influenced the world.

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MATRIX X DETROIT PAMELA WISE 2016 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC DATE: November 16, 2019 PARTNER: Shrine of the Black Madonna LOCATION: 7625 Linwood St, Detroit, MI 48206

Photos by Darrel Ellis courtesy of of The Kresge Foundation 36

Matrix X Detroit showcases music, spoken word and poetry, and dance to reflect the remarkable, unstoppable, and diverse Detroit community. This hour-long performance is anchored by three new original music compositions by Pamela Wise: “Adjusting to the Grid,” “New Faces and Places,” and “A Heart of Gold.” At its core, this work addresses the inequities of the current renewal and recovery taking place in Detroit.

Following the performance, the community joins in conversation with Ted Phillips from the Detroit Housing Coalition, Monica Edmunds from the Vanguard Corporation, and Wayne County Commissioner Irma Clarke Coleman. Matrix X Detroit creates and holds space for difficult conversations and diverse perspectives. Through narrative, movement, music, and dialogue, audiences confront the impacts of displacement, question easy tropes of resiliency, and imagine more equitable horizons.

PAMELA WISE is a jazz pianist and composer whose signature use of polyrhythmic meters traces that of her African ancestors, with a specific focus on West Africa. Pamela’s work has been showcased in collaborations with saxophonist Dave McMurray, violinist Regina Carter, saxophonist Wendell Harrison, and vocalist Naima Shamborguer. Pamela has multiple internationally recognized albums to her credit, including Kindred Spirits (2015) Pamela’s Club (2007), Negre con Leche (2002), and Songo Festividad (1994).

Her compositions have twice earned her the Creative Artist Award from ArtServe Michigan. Pamela also serves as music minister at the Shrine of the Black Madonna. She is a sought-after piano teacher and is executive director of Rebirth Inc., a nonprofit jazz performing arts organization that produces live concerts and jazz education programs.

The Shrine of the Black Madonna is in the heart of Detroit, where the 1967 Rebellion began on Linwood between West Grand Blvd and Davison. This institution serves over 3000 community residents. As its music minister, I have witnessed how little investment has come to this historically important neighborhood. Detroit is a complex cultural matrix. While new opportunities are available and urban renewal is taking place, many residents wonder how they fit into this matrix.

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AQUATIC MESSAGING SENGHOR REID 2009 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, VISUAL ARTS DATE: November 16, 2019 PARTNER: The RAW Space LOCATION: 8420 W McNichols Rd, Detroit, MI 48221

Aquatic Messaging is an interactive performance combining dance, music, and visual art to educate people about water justice. Through movement, sound, and graphic messaging, the audience gains knowledge about the privatization, deprivation, and contamination of our water sources while learning to heal their own relationship with water.

Clean, safe water is biologically necessary and wholly not substitutable, yet globally, corporations commoditize water, creating shortages in exchange for corporate profits. Where not tainted by industry and pollution, water is still at risk of contamination through aged delivery systems, antiquated processing practices, low quality standards, and limited access for those most vulnerable. Detroit faces a public health crisis plagued by water shut offs and alarming levels of lead and copper within the water supplied to the city’s schools.

Aquatic Messaging promotes dialogue around the issues of water justice in our immediate and global community, foregrounding the health and wellness component of clean water consumption. The performance is set in a not-too-distant speculative future where water is hazardous and scarce, but no less necessary to life on earth. Aquatic Messaging engages audiences’ senses through call-and-response guided by percussion, physical participation, and large-scale interactive visuals to make the importance of water to our collective ability to thrive personal and visceral.

SENGHOR REID explores the interactions between the human body and the environment, creating visual representations of dreams, memories, and traces of human contact with nature. Reid earned a BFA from the University of Michigan, a MAT in art education from Wayne State University, and attended the internationally recognized Marathon Program at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Schools (Bloomfield Hills, MI) and is a National Board Certified Teacher in visual arts (National Board of Professional Teaching Standards). He has received many awards including the Governor’s Art Award (ArtServe Michigan). Reid’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad in galleries and museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Kentler International Drawing Space, St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His work is in private, public, and corporate art collections.

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Photos by Montez Miller courtesy of The Kresge Foundation

The demand for water justice is real. Detroit could be easily crippled by lack of clean drinking water, despite Michigan holding 84% of North America’s fresh surface water. It’s time to organize and mobilize.

Aquatic Messaging connects us to the spirit of resilience that is this place. We demand our rightful place at any and all tables. As Detroiters, we clearly signify our refusal to regard ourselves as less deserving or less entitled to our humanity.

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JIT THE FUNK UP AND DANCE! RONALD FORD JR. AKA QWNTYM 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LIVE ARTS DATE: November 23, 2019 PARTNER: International Institute of Metropolitan Detroit LOCATION: 111 E Kirby St, Detroit, MI 48202

Jit the Funk Up and Dance! is part concert and part showcase. It centers on Detroit’s techno sounds and its original urban dances born in the 1970s: Jit and Funkateer. Hosted by QWNTYM (Quantum) and featuring DJ Deadline, this event is packed with original music performances, DJ sets, choreography, and freestyle solos, combining choreography and live rap performance simultaneously.

Jit the Funk Up and Dance! is the merging of the Jit and Funkateer dance forms, sprinkled with a bit of history, acknowledgments, and crowd-participation lessons. The project engages the very residents who preserve, perform, and protect our dance heritage.

Ronald Ford Jr. held workshops in several high schools to attract younger audiences, starting with Southeastern High School of Technology and Law and Denby High School, where he attended and first learned how to Jit then Funkateer.

During the show, each song features a different set of Jitters that individualizes that song’s concept.

Between sets, live mixes highlight new locally produced techno, house, and electro tracks as Jitters freestyle.

Members of the audience also have a chance to display their dance skills. Local Jitters address the problem of underrepresentation of urban dance culture in the very city that gave birth to those forms.

RONALD FORD JR. first began dancing at two years old, when he mimicked James Brown. Little did he know that 10 years later, he would be learning the only two original Detroit dance styles: Jit and Funkateer.

Since then, he has been thrilling audiences in Germany, Korea, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, The Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, and the Movement Electronic Music Festival’s main stage, to name a few. Along with his dance group, Unstoppables, he has danced for world-renowned acts such as Afrika Bambaataa, Run-DMC, Los Hermanos, and AUX 88. Using the stage name QWNTYM, pronounced “Quantum,” Ronald has also been composing electronic music for 15 years, mainly focusing on the Detroit techno and electro genres. His mission is to continue showcasing unique Detroit dances and music to the world. In addition to his music and dance endeavors, Ronald is also a playwright and director.

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Photos by Cybelle Codish courtesy of The Kresge Foundation

I strive to preserve this culture via various platforms, including showcases, plays, workshops, and music production. While I am a product of Detroit’s dances of yesterday, I am also a torch bearer for the contemporary Funkateer style. I am committed to not only stay relevant, but to sow seeds for the future.

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I have found my calling as a self-styled Detroitist, engaging residents old and new on the history and current conundrums present in this transitioning city. The sheer magnificence and dynamism of Black Detroit continues to impact the world through the city’s legacy of architecture, industry, music, and activism. My works directly address a lack of acknowledgment of the significant role of African Americans in and to early and mid-century Detroit.

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THE DETROITIST MARSHA MUSIC 2012 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LITERARY ARTS DATE: December 1, 2019 PARTNER: Detroit Fiber Works LOCATION: 19359 Livernois, Detroit, MI 48221

Photos by Miz Korona

The Detroitist is a new anthology of Marsha Music’s essays and lyric poems, focused on Detroit’s history, midcentury transition, and contemporary changes. This anthology brings together the personal and the historical through writings on John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, and Detroit techno - as well as the 1967 Rebellion, and her years as an activist and labor leader. The Detroitist features “Requiem for a Record Shop Man,” Marsha’s narrative about her father Joe Von Battle’s record shop, Black Bottom; Hastings Street; 12th Street; and the Black experience in Detroit.

Marsha’s essays, poems and public presentations navigate some of the complex and difficult situations emerging from the redevelopment of Detroit and the exclusion inherent in much of that change. Launching at Detroit Fiber Works, Marsha presents excerpts from the book including her acclaimed essay “The Kidnapped Children of Detroit” and her celebrated poem “Just Say Hi (The Gentrification Blues).” The first of several gatherings around the city to introduce the book, this event celebrates and supports the survival of small, creative businesses on the important Livernois corridor (Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion).

MARSHA MUSIC was born in Detroit and grew up in Highland Park, Michigan. She is the daughter of legendary pre-Motown record producer Joe Von Battle and West Side Detroit beauty and music lover Shirley Battle. Marsha is a former activist and labor leader and a noted speaker. She has contributed to significant Detroit narratives, including Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, University of Michigan’s Living Music oral history project, and Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit, as well as an HBO documentary on the Detroit Tigers. In 2015, she was commissioned to create a poem about Detroit for Tod Machover’s acclaimed Symphony in D, which she read in performances with Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A Detroit cultural luminary, Marsha was the opening speaker for the July 2016 launch of the Detroit ‘67 project at the Detroit Historical Museum and was commissioned to create a poem for the Belle Isle Conservancy. Music received a 2015 Knight Arts Challenge award and was a 2015 New Museum IdeasCity Detroit fellow. In 2018, she lost her husband, the artist David Philpot, and she feels his supportive spirit in this project.

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My family is from Beirut, but this was my first visit there. It had a strange effect on me that I can only explain as dully (not romantically) familiar. I was interested in exploring hybridized identities through my own slightly ambivalent relationship to my Arab American heritage. The film deals with this, but also morphed into a meditation on notions of motherhood and motherland, and the ways in which they are romanticized.

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MARRATEIN, MARRATEIN JULIA YEZBICK 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC DATE: December 7, 2019 PARTNER: Arab American National Museum LOCATION: 13624 Michigan Ave, Dearborn, MI 48126

marratein, marratein is a film about two cities: Detroit and Beirut. It is a film about belonging, diasporas, and the uncertainty of returning to a place to which one has never actually been. Shot on Super 8 to evoke the feeling of home movies, with voice-over excerpts from Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, the film comments on the performance of tradition and the struggle of finding or creating one’s own sense of identity and cultural belonging at a time when such things have taken on renewed political and social significance.

Marratein means “twice” in Arabic, and this film doubles over itself as a palindrome—a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward. It highlights a perspective of Detroit’s Arab American community and speaks to this city’s large immigrant and diaspora populations.

The film is an exploration of affect and inherited trauma that seeks to linger in a fruitful space of uncertainty and unease. It is unclear which footage was shot in which place—Detroit or Beirut, and the two cities are placed in productive tension not to compare them to each other, but rather to meld them in a way that questions the very distinctiveness and specificity of not only place, but our memories and experiences of place.

JULIA YEZBICK is a filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist. She received her PhD in media anthropology and critical media practice from Harvard University and an MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester.

Her artistic work is grounded in long-term engagements with people and places and is often a critical part of her academic pursuits exploring labor and the body, the materiality of postindustrial urban landscapes, the senses, processes of creative knowledge production, and housing and the built environment. Her audio and video work has shown at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, MoMA PS1, the New York Library for Performing Arts, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico, The International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is a recipient of a Dan David Prize for plastic arts. Yezbick is the founding Editor of Sensate, an online journal for experiments in critical media practice, and co-directs Mothlight Microcinema. She lives and works in Detroit.

Photos by Erin Kirkland courtesy of The Kresge Foundation 45

NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE EDGE SHAUN S. NETHERCOTT 2016 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LIVE ARTS DATE: December 8–22, 2019 PARTNER: Mexicantown Latino Cultural Center LOCATION: 2835 Bagley St, Detroit, MI, 48216

Neighborhood on the Edge is a sound and image installation featuring the voices and images of 10 Hubbard Richard residents reflecting a range of ethnicities, ages, and durations lived in the community.

The installation involves 4x8’ portraits and other largescale neighborhood landscapes by photographer Romain Blanquart, and a sound score edited from nearly 10 hours of residents’ testimonies installed at the Mexicantown Latino Cultural Center in the Hubbard Richard neighborhood.

Twenty years ago, the neighborhood was reduced to a few hundred residents after the Ambassador Bridge project demolished hundreds of houses. This small Southwest Detroit neighborhood of 1,200 people is in danger once more. The bridge recently received approval for its second span, and its owners have now petitioned the City of Detroit to close St. Anne Street, isolating its historic church—the second oldest parish in the United States—and sealing off access to several small streets. The international border with Canada is now the site of regular US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and constant border patrols. Elders from the Rio Vista Detroit Co-op are afraid to walk the streets because of harassment. Neighbors welcomed the news that Ford Motor Company will redevelop Michigan Central Station at the northeast corner of the neighborhood, but the news is fueling rampant speculation. One 720 square foot house recently sold for over $200,000.

Neighborhood on the Edge allows viewers to see and hear the complexity of the community in this moment. It highlights the precarious situation of a small, vibrant neighborhood whose residents seem to have little control over their future.

DR. SHAUN S. NETHERCOTT uses immersive or mobile staging, audience engagement, and polyphonic voices to explore feminist, environmental, and other social justice themes. She has dedicated her life to creating plays that give voice to the unheard through

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structures that transmit their own meaning, and which engage audiences in personal, interactive, and placebased ways. Over her 30-year career as an artist, arts administrator, and activist, she developed and produced 32 new plays, including mobile works Fear and Faith, Raven’s Seed, and Ghost Waters; sitespecific works Once Was Paradise and Boomtown 1925; and immersive pieces ’37-’87, Trial, and Mother Tongue. Most of her performances have integrated wide-scale community engagement activities developed in partnership with non-arts community organizations. As the founder of Matrix Theatre Company in Detroit, she has received numerous awards and commendations, including the Governor’s Art Award, Mattin Arts Award for work with at-risk youth, and the Theresa Maxis Award for Social Justice.

Are we in control of the places where we live? Who determines what happens to our communities? These questions of place and people have long haunted my work. This installation is designed to spark thought, conversation, and action on these critical concerns.

Photos by: Left page: Erin Kirkland courtesy of The Kresge Foundation Middle: Miz Korona This page: Erin Kirkland courtesy of The Kresge Foundation 47

Photos by Miz Korona 48

DANCES FROM THE STATE OF VERACRUZ LANCE RODRIGUEZ 2018 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LIVE ARTS

BALLET FOLKLÓRICO DE DETROIT DATE: December 15, 2019 PARTNER: Senate Theater LOCATION: 6424 Michigan Ave, Detroit, MI 48210

The Mexican folklórico dance style of Veracruz is known for its technically challenging, fast paced dance steps.

Lance Rodriguez and Ballet Folklórico de Detroit spent over five years rigorously training to bring these traditional dances to life for Detroit audiences.

Mexico is a melting pot of different cultural influences, much like the United States. Veracruz has several dance styles influenced by indigenous, African, and Spanish peoples. To expand their knowledge of the physically demanding postures and steps of Veracruz style dances, the ensemble works with folklórico maestra Ofelia Sanchez Gonzalez. Beyond the dances, history, culture, and costume are central to this community concert and showcase.

Today’s environment is one of open hostility towards immigrants, making it difficult for immigrants to feel safe in everyday life and even more difficult to express cultural pride. Beginning with only four dancers, Ballet Folklórico de Detroit has grown to nearly 50 active dancers bringing folklórico to over 100 students. Ballet Folklórico de Detroit was founded on the idea that through purpose and hard work, folklórico can embody the best traditions of Mexico’s people and places for the Detroit community.

The last five years have inflicted a sense of uneasiness within the immigrant, and particularly the Hispanic, community. So many of our dancers, students, and community members have rallied around folklórico.

This new project amplifies the culture of Veracruz through music, costumes, and the challenging dance styles of this place. We are proud of our history and culture, and the way it propels us forward as a community.

LANCE RODRIGUEZ is a choreographer, teacher, and artistic director with 18+ years of dance experience. He has studied and performed with various troupes, choreographers, professors, and maestros of Mexican folklórico.

He began work as a choreographer in 2013, when he established Ballet Folklórico de Detroit performing troupe.

He choreographs dances using the historically precise requirements of folklórico while employing fresh, modern adaptations. He has danced at hundreds of venues, including the White House.

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RAISING CARLITO NATASHA MILLER 2012 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, PERFORMING ARTS DATE: December 29, 2019 PARTNER: Artists Inn Detroit LOCATION: 8640 La Salle Blvd, Detroit, MI 48206

Raising Carlito is a documentary that highlights the challenges of imprisoned women of color raising their children.

The film follows 10-year-old Carlito as he is being raised in Detroit by his paternal aunt, maternal grandmother, and imprisoned mother.

The documentary takes a deep and personal look at the challenges he and his caregivers navigate both inside and outside of prison walls. Raising Carlito gives voice to the children and families navigating the complex circumstances and relationships stemming from incarceration. The film asks audiences to engage with issues of mass incarceration emotionally, weaving together its narrative from prison phone calls, letters, and a series of interviews with Carlito’s family members, families facing similar circumstances, and experts discussing the effects that prison parenting has on children.

Artist’s Inn Detroit serves as the venue for showing an in-progress cut of the film, followed by an audience discussion about the detrimental impacts of incarceration on the incarcerated and their families. The goal is to shift the narrative of absentee parenting towards a conversation of how collective parenting creates a positive infrastructure for youth development.

NATASHA T. MILLER is a performance poet, writer, LGBTQ activist, film producer, and founder of Artists’ Inn Detroit, a bed and breakfast for artists. Natasha is a three-time Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist and has been part of four national slam teams. In 2010, she starred in a national Sprite commercial and started her publishing company All I Wanna Say Publishing. Since then, she has published two books, Dreams of a Beginner and Coming Out of Nowhere, a social networking memoir about homosexuality, religion, and cyberbullying.

Natasha has been on three national tours and performed at renowned venues across the country. She believes her purpose is to create change and peace like so many great leaders before her.

I wanted to make a film that challenges us to reimagine family—to think about the role of extended family, co-parenting strategies, and more in support of Black and Brown youth. The film provides an opportunity for us to hear from women in prison, to see how hard they love, even as they are subjected to a racially oppressive system of mass incarceration.

This film makes room for people who are consistently underestimated and undervalued to tell their own stories.

Left page: Film still courtesy of Natasha Miller This page: Photo by Miz Korona 51

WORKS IN PROGRESS COVID-19 is locally and globally impacting and reshaping our present and our futures. Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Safer at Home Order, first instituted in March 2020 to combat the virus and flatten Michigan’s curve, impacted the completion of three AXD artists’ projects that were due to premiere in spring and summer 2020.

We look forward to the time when we can come together to celebrate their completion.

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In 1980, Detroit enacted a propertyseizing “quick-take” law, the most aggressive type of eminent domain in the United States. The man behind the law? Someone whose own childhood community was razed by eminent domain decades earlier. This is the story of the destruction of one man’s neighborhood, and another neighborhood he helped destroy.

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THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND NICOLE MACDONALD 2017 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, VISUAL ARTS

This documentary looks at the choices that politicians make and what they do to retain power, seen through the context of Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, and the issue of eminent domain. This Land is Their Land focuses on this controversial and charismatic mayor, elected during a national wave of Black mayoral wins and the beginning of Black political power in the 1970s. Young took the helm on the heels of one of the most consequential civil disturbances in US history and the looming collapse of the auto industry.

During his 20-year tenure, Young was credited for a number of solid accomplishments: decreasing police brutality, bringing increased racial representation to the police and fire departments, developing downtown projects, and strengthening arts programming and public transportation, while balancing an ever-shrinking civic budget. However, Young is still perceived by many white Detroiters (in both the city and suburbs) as corrupt and divisive, the reason for the city’s collapse.

This film addresses Black political power in 1960s–70s Detroit, Young’s history in the African American Black Bottom neighborhood in the 1940s, and its subsequent bulldozing and removal through eminent domain.

It explores why this happened, who was removed, how people were affected, and how this influenced Young’s views of property ownership and public housing policies, including his own choice to bulldoze a long-standing Polish community in order to construct an auto plant that now faces an uncertain future. The film examines the historic relationship of property ownership to prosperity and intergenerational wealth, specifically in African American communities, and how the recent foreclosure crisis affected Detroit.

Clockwise from lower left: Dr. DesJardins, photo by Nicole Macdonald Lottie the Body in her apartment, photo by Nicole Macdonald Chris holding Hard Stuff, photo

by Bill Kubota courtesy of Nicole Macdonald T-Bone Walker and Lottie the Body, 1960s (archival)

NICOLE MACDONALD is an artist who paints and collages her Detroit environment in miniatures and maximums, portraits and landscapes, with brush and camera. Her documentaries on the Detroit environment and city history have won Best Michigan Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Humboldt Film Festival, and a John Michaels Film Award for at the Big Muddy Film Festival. They have also screened at Media City Film Festival and Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Nicole’s paintings and collages have been exhibited in local, national, and international shows, including Casco Art Institute (The Netherlands), and Detroit Institute of Arts. She is involved with the boards of various nonprofits and galleries in the city of Detroit, including City Sculpture (founder), Southwest Artist Latino Network (founder), Detroit Artists Market, and Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. Nicole’s roughly 10-foot portraits of historical Detroiters have been erected throughout the city since 2014, as part of the Detroit Portrait Series. Her work was published in Canvas Detroit (2015) and Essay’d, Vol 1 (2016) by Wayne State Press, and in Hyperallergic and Art in America magazines. In 2018, she was awarded a residency at Signal-Return. Her recent documentary film, Last Days of Chinatown, has played at festivals around the country and on PBS.

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VACANT LOTS BILLY MARK 2015 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, LITERARY ARTS

BILL HARRIS 2011 KRESGE FOUNDATION EMINENT ARTIST

There is the sense that our times are new— and in many ways, they are—but in ways that are essential and often hidden, they are not new. Potent mixtures of upheaval, anxiety, and hope are deeply part of our shared human experience. Everyone who is old, at one point, has been young.

MARION HAYDEN 2016 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, FILM & MUSIC

ARISE ROCK

Vacant Lots is an app-based sound map story for the North End and Piety Hill neighborhoods. Utilizing narrative, music, and field recordings, the app provides users with a sequential experience as they walk from place to place, exploring what has changed and what has stayed the same, the neighborhoods’ generational and geographic divisions, and its various other fault lines.

The text for one sound map will be created by Bill Harris, set east of Woodward in the North End neighborhood, and told through the eyes of young people. This story will be condensed and adapted for the sound map and set to jazz music created by Marion Hayden. On the west side of Woodward, a similar sound map will be set.

Here, the music and narrative will be created by Arise Rock and other high schoolers from the neighborhood.

Audiences will walk through the shifting landscape of these two neighborhoods listening to invisible voices set in vacant lots, hearing stories from elders as they describe their youth and voices of youth as they describe and make sense of the world around them. These divergent and overlapping stories will offer a space to meditate on the nature of place, belonging, and community.

BILLY MARK is a multi-disciplinary poet that has worked in poetry, composition, theater, and performance art. He attended California Institute of the Arts and has received awards like the Los Angeles Black Music Award for Best Spoken Word.

BILL HARRIS is a Wayne State University emeritus professor of English. He is a creative writer and arts critic. He formerly served as artistic coordinator at both JazzMobile and the New Federal Theatre in New York and was Chief Curator at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. His plays have received over a hundred productions nationwide.

MARION HAYDEN is one of the nation’s finest proponents of the acoustic bass. Steeped in the jazz tradition and mentored by Detroit’s jazz royalty—trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, pianist and composer Kenn Cox, and saxophonists Wendell Harrison, Donald Walden, and Charles Gabriel—she has performed with such luminaries as Geri Allen, Bobby McFerrin, Regina Carter, Steve Turre, and Nancy Wilson, and is co-founder of the groundbreaking women-led jazz ensemble Straight Ahead.

Photos courtesy of Billy Mark 56

ARISE ROCK is a freshman attending Detroit School of the Arts. She majors in theater and is a member of the Thespian Honors Society. Rock is also the author of The Trail to Home, a free-verse novel that she self-published.

She also writes fiction and fantasy novels.

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PHILPOT TIFF MASSEY 2015 KRESGE ARTIST FELLOW, VISUAL ARTS

David Philpot moved to Detroit about six years ago, in his 70s, when he fell in love with Detroiter and Kresge Artist Fellow Marsha Music. He was quickly embraced by other artists in the community for his incredible talent, warm personality, and humble demeanor. In 2017 David was awarded a Kresge Artist Fellowship in visual arts. Admired as an elder, he passed away in 2018. Philpot is a mural designed to celebrate his life and legacy, a large-scale, two-dimensional portrait surrounded by examples of David’s artwork, and part of ongoing and urgent efforts to highlight important Black artists in Detroit.

TIFF MASSEY is an interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She holds an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work, inspired by African standards of economic vitality, includes both large-scale and wearable sculptures, music, and performance. Massey counts the iconic material culture of 1980s hip-hop as a major influence in her jewelry. Her work draws on contemporary conceptions of class and race through the lens of the African Diaspora combined with her experiences in Detroit.

Massey is a two-time Knight Foundation Knight Arts Challenge winner and a Michigan Chronicle 40 Under 40 Award recipient. Massey has participated in several international residencies including the New Museum’s IdeasCity (in Detroit; Athens, Greece; and Arles, France) and at the Volterra-Detroit Foundation in Volterra, Italy.

Massey’s work has been widely exhibited in both national and international museums and galleries.

Photos by Lauren Rossi courtesy of Tiff Massey 58

David Philpot was not a native Detroiter, but he was accepted as an elder into the art community here and was respected and loved. His story is important.

His legacy is important. Through my work, I am always pushing boundaries—those placed on me by others and the ones I place on myself. Philpot’s brilliance is an inspiration for me and many others in our community to push forward.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Photos by Dave Lewinski courtesy of Midtown Detroit, Inc. Images left to right starting at top row: Hubert Massey, The Peoples’ Vision 2013 Louis Aguilar, The Troublemakers: The True, Epic Story of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Depression-era Detroit 2011 Shara Nova, My Brightest Diamond opening ceremony concert, 2013 Haleem “Stringz” Rasul Ar-Rasheed, Hardcore Detroit The Jitterbugs “Pioneers of the Jit” 2011 Scott Hocking, The Secrets of Nature 2013 Chido Johnson, A Dance for Diego 2011 Tyree Guyton, Street Folk 2011 Lolita Hernandez Butterflies, Roti, Tornadoes, Oh My 2013 Olayami Dabls Unidentified Standing Objects 2013 62

ART X DETROIT LEGACY AXD Living X is a successor to the biennial Art X festivals originally produced by Midtown Detroit, Inc., which presented new works by Kresge Artist Fellows primarily in venues in Midtown, Downtown, and Eastern Market from 2011 to 2015.

Planning and conversations for a new biennial festival began in 2009. Midtown Detroit, Inc., in partnership with The Kresge Foundation, Kresge Arts in Detroit, and Creative Many Michigan, worked to develop a festival platform for new and challenging work by Kresge Artist Fellows and Eminent Artists, highlighting the role of anchor cultural institutions and creative venues primarily in Midtown Detroit.

Art X 2011 was a free, five-day series of exhibitions, presentations, readings, discussions, concerts, and dance performances for the Detroit community. The festival showcased newly commissioned works from the 36 winners of the Kresge Artist Fellowship and its two Eminent Artists, renowned visual artist Charles McGee and iconic jazz musician Marcus Belgrave. It welcomed thousands of visitors and audiences from April 6–10, 2011.

Art X Detroit 2013 (April 10–14) featured Eminent Artists Naomi Long Madgett and Bill Harris, along with the 36 Artist Fellows. The festival added additional programming, contextualizing events, and panel discussions, and expanded its regional and national media and audience reach.

Art X 2015 was expanded by The Kresge Foundation and Midtown Detroit, Inc. to a 10-day festival featuring art exhibitions, film screenings, workshops, and panel discussions along with dance, musical, theatrical, and literary performances of various types. The festival took place over three weekends from April 9–26, 2015. This iteration of the event also grew in footprint, expanding to include Midtown, Eastern Market, and Downtown, staging more than 50 events in nearly 20 venues and representing 38 Kresge fellows—2013’s visual and literary arts fellows; 2014’s dance, music, film, and theatre fellows; and two eminent artists, David DiChiera and Bill Rauhauser. Art X 2015 was the final iteration produced by Midtown Detroit, Inc. and provided the public with compelling opportunities to experience Detroit as an incubator for multidisciplinary art.

Art X Detroit continues to be a platform for the creative community in Detroit to shape and center its unique cultural identity and social complexities through the commissioning of new work.

ABOUT MIDTOWN DETROIT, INC. Midtown Detroit, Inc. (MDI) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization created to support and enhance community and economic development in the Midtown & New Center areas of Detroit through collaboration and partnerships with key stakeholders and supportive funders. Executive Director Sue Mosey and Director of Arts and Culture Annmarie Borucki led the Art X Detroit programs from 2011–2015.

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TEAM

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CÉZANNE CHARLES

JOHN MARSHALL

AXD 2019 CURATOR AND CO-EDITOR

CO-EDITOR

Cézanne Charles has more than 20 years of executive and senior management experience in nonprofit and for-profit creative industries in the United States and the United Kingdom. With John Marshall, she is the co-founder and director of rootoftwo, a research- and practice-driven hybrid design studio that engages in civic future-making, using design methods to facilitate people to imagine and shape collective actions for more just, resilient, inclusive, and adaptive futures.

From 2008-2019, Cézanne served as director of creative industries at Creative Many, where she led the design and implementation of the company’s creative industries research. Here, Cézanne also designed and directed programs that provided the knowledge, funding, networks, and advocacy needed to help empower the practices of Michigan artists, designers, and makers, with a core focus on Detroit.

Cézanne serves on the Stewardship Board for Design Core Detroit’s UNESCO City of Design initiative, the Allied Media Projects Board of Directors, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Americans for the Arts Creative Economy Advisory, and the Zoning Advisory Group of the Detroit Planning Commission. Pronouns: she/her/hers

John Marshall is a designer, educator, and creative technologist with over 20 years’ experience. John co-directs rootoftwo with Cézanne Charles. Recent projects have been featured in Wired, Fast Company, Dezeen, Metropolis, Dwell, Studio International, Fresh Art International, and The Guardian. rootoftwo has work in the collections of Folkestone Artworks, the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Past projects have been awarded an American Institute of Architects Michigan Award (2016), an American Institute of Architects Small Project Practitioners Award (2010), Architect Magazine’s 2010 R+D Award for architectural research, and have been highly commended in the 2011 AR Emerging Architecture Awards from the Architectural Review. John pursues new educational models, technologies, and tools for teaching and learning as a tenured associate professor of art & design at the University of Michigan. Pronouns: he/ him/his

DOMINIQUE CAMPBELL

LAUREN ROSSI

AXD MANAGER

ARTIST INITIATIVES MANAGER

Dominique Campbell is a multi-hyphenate artist, social entrepreneur, and cultural organizer who seamlessly blends the worlds of music, advocacy, and activism.

Under her stage name, Nique Love Rhodes, she is a dynamic recording artist and performer who has quickly developed into one of the hottest music acts coming out of Detroit. As an entrepreneur, she recently launched Rise Up Higher, an initiative that uses music as a tool for social good and positive social change.

She is also the co-founder of D.Cipher, a music mastermind collective dedicated to advancing the Detroit music economy through collaboration and partnerships and that has invested over $20,000 into Detroit’s independent music community. This experience as an independent artist and entrepreneur has given her more than 13 years of insight and knowledge into balancing a creative practice with business, and how to leverage both for positive social impact. Through her company Inspired by NLR, she curates, produces, and manages events that infuse communities with arts that advocate for and advance social justice initiatives.

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Lauren Rossi is a Detroit-based cultural producer and consultant for artists and arts organizations. She has expertise in professional development, career consultation, grant writing, project management, and strategic planning, and is dedicated to supporting LGBTQI+, BIPOC, and womxn artists. In 2019, Rossi was co-curator of arts and culture for re:publica Detroit, in partnership with Europe’s largest conference on the internet and digital society. From 2016– 2020, she developed and managed the Kresge Artist Fellows professional practice opportunities program and led workshops to empower and inform the practices of creative practitioners throughout Southeast Michigan and beyond for Creative Many Michigan.

She also worked as studio manager for Tiff Massey, an interdisciplinary artist based in Detroit, from 2016–2020. Rossi was education program coordinator for public programs and student engagement at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) from 2011–2016. She holds a BFA in fine art and art history from Eastern Michigan University and is a 2017 fellow of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators. Pronouns: she/her/hers

Photos by: Left to right: CJ Benninger, Nick Beardslee, Dan McDougall, CJ Benninger 65

THANKS & CREDITS We are profoundly grateful to the artists, partners, community members, community builders, and audiences that supported and participated in AXD throughout 2019 and 2020.

This edition of AXD, in part, serves as a celebration of the first decade of the Kresge Arts in Detroit initiative. Funded by The Kresge Foundation, the Kresge Eminent Artist Awards, Kresge Artist Fellowships, and Gilda Awards are administered by the Kresge Arts in Detroit office at the College for Creative Studies. To date, Kresge Arts in Detroit has awarded 218 Kresge Artist Fellowships, 22 Gilda Awards, and 12 Kresge Eminent Artist Awards for a total of more than $6 million. We would like to thank the team at the Kresge Arts in Detroit office for their partnership and leadership in providing critically needed, no-stringsattached support and recognition for artists in metro Detroit.

AXD CURATORIAL ADVISORY To our curatorial advisory panelists who reviewed the open-call proposal submissions from Kresge Artist Fellows, Gilda Awardees, and Eminent Artists, thank you. Your discussions not only informed the final project selections, but richly contributed to the Living X theme.

Panelists: Pradeep Dalal, Program Director, Arts Writers Grant Program, Creative Capital Pat Elifritz, Curator of New Media and Technology, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Rachel Harkai, writer and 2010 Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts Cornelius Harris, Label Manager, Submerge Records and Founder, Alter Ego Management Njia Kai, filmmaker and cultural producer Sarida Scott, Program Officer, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and former Executive Director, Community Development Advocates of Detroit Anthony D. Stepter, Assistant Director, Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate program, University of Illinois at Chicago

AXD ARTIST PARTY On August 9, 2019, we held a late-night party to kick back and celebrate the AXD artists’ projects in the Eastern Market area of Detroit. The artists shared about their work in a fast-paced idea cipher, there was live music and food. Thank you to Trinosophes, Rebecca Mazzei, and Joel Peterson (2010 Kresge Artist Fellow, Music) for hosting us. Thank you to Union Street Detroit for providing catering.

AXD COMMUNITY CONVERSATION On October 12, 2019, we held a three-hour community conversation to explore the role of artists as activists, particularly in the context of working in neighborhoods and uplifting narratives of underestimated people and communities. Thank you to our national panelists and the participating AXD artist panelists.

AXD Artist Panelists: Taylor Renee Aldridge (FLY | DROWN) Marion Hayden (Highland Park: City of Ogun) Senghor Reid (Aquatic Messaging) Kayla Mundy and Justino Solis, Black and Brown Theatre (Our Voices Festival of New Plays) National Panelists: Whitney Hardy, Founder, 3RDSPACE (Memphis, TN) Jeffreen Hayes, Executive Director, ThreeWalls (Chicago, IL) Julie Yost, Director of Public Programming, Rebuild Foundation (Chicago, IL) Thank you too to Wendy Lewis Jackson, managing director for The Kresge Foundation’s Detroit Program, who provided opening remarks, to our hosts at Neighborhood HomeBase and Live 6 in Northwest Detroit, and to Detroit Sip and Nostimo Kitchen for catering.

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THE LIVING X PODCAST Thank you to Ryan Myers-Johnson, executive director of Sidewalk Detroit for hosting this series, and to Wayne Ramocan from Red Carpet Lounge for producing and editing the series. Hometown, the music used for the series, was provided by Pamela Wise. This podcast is a product of rootoftwo and made possible with support from The Kresge Foundation. Thank you to the participating AXD Artists and partners.

Taylor Aldridge & Jennifer Harge (FLY | DROWN) Robert Jones (Detroit: Twenty Minutes Apart) Marion Hayden (Highland Park: City of Ogun) Pam Wise (Matrix X Detroit) Emilio Rodriguez (Our Voices Festival of New Plays) Ron “QWNTYM” Ford (Jit the Funk Up and Dance!)

Carrie Morris (The Firefighters) Marsha Music (The Detroitist) Natasha Miller (Raising Carlito) Julia Yezbick (marratein, marratein) Shaun Nethercott (Neighborhood on the Edge) Bob Sestok (Cass Corridor Art & Beyond, 1967-2020) Sacramento Knoxx (Spirit Plate) The TETRA (Freedom School) Michael A. Williams, Associate Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation W. Kim Heron, Senior Communications Officer, The Kresge Foundation

DESIGN & PROMOTION PARTNERS Branding & Book Design: Middlecott Design Promotion & Marketing: Olu & Company Web Design: Brightly THE KRESGE FOUNDATION Wendy Lewis Jackson, Managing Director, Detroit Program Michael A. Williams, Associate Program Officer W. Kim Heron, Senior Communications Officer Jonathan Hui, Program Officer Bryan P. Hogle, Senior Program Officer CULTURESOURCE (FISCAL SPONSOR) Omari Rush, Executive Director Kim Howard, Director of Stewardship & Engagement Jane Linn, Fiscal Services Specialist MANDELL MENKES LLC (LEGAL) Joe Voss, of Counsel

CultuRESouRCE.o R g

CULtUre SOURCE

CultureSource 6200 Second Ave, Unit 003 Detroit, MI 48202 (313) 831-1151 Tonya M. Matthews, PhD, Chairman Omari Rush, Executive Director

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FinanCiaL overview

Partners

Operating financials, not inclusive of restricted revenue or sponsored projects’ funds

Donors of $5,000 or more to CultureSource programs and services in 2019 Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

$1 Million

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ISBN 978-1-7354079-0-6

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