Past Artist Salons

April 28: Brian Day, Jessica Frelinghuysen, Cyrus Karimipour

Brian Day is a third generation Detroit native. He discovered photography in 2008 through the suggestion of a colleague and began exploring documentary and fine art projects around the city using film and digital cameras. Day cites the work of Ansel Adams, Gordon Parks, Michael Kenna, and Alexander Rodchenko as early influences. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, and published in Scientific American, Hour Detroit, Esquire, Smithsonian, CNN, The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, and Detroit Metro Times, among others.

Jessica Frelinghuysen creates performances and participatory installations to reconcile complex, everyday social situations. Her work has been shown at the Mattress Factory Museum, the Broad Art Museum, and the Art Gallery of Windsor, as well as on numerous sidewalks and in various social spaces. Jessica has been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sculpture Space, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She teaches at the University of Michigan. You might encounter Frelinghuysen performing in her Sound Collecting Suit and recording interviews on the streets of her hometown, Hamtramck.

Cyrus Karimipour received his MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and is represented by the David Klein Gallery in Detroit. His photographs have been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Light Work, and internationally in galleries in Germany, Austria, Lithuania, and China. Karimipour’s work has been published in Harper’s Magazine and Contact Sheet, and can be found in the collections of Light Work, New York; Center for Contemporary Art, New Mexico; Lishui Photography Museum, China; and La Fototeca, Guatemala.

April 21: Peter Daniel Bernal, Gisela McDaniel, Neha Vedpathak

Peter Daniel Bernal grew up in Houston, Texas and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2000 with a BFA in painting. He received additional education at the Rhode Island School of Design and trained in printmaking and drawing in Weimar, Germany, where he lived from 2010 to 2015. In 2015, he relocated from Germany to Detroit. His primary focus is on storytelling-based oil painting but he also creates polychromed ceramic, linoleum prints, and pastels. In the past two years, he has completed several murals around Detroit, under the Perez pseudonym.

Neha Vedpathak creates work that merges the personal and the political. She aims to broaden the dialog and understanding of issues related to spirituality, identity, and social & gender politics. Vedpathak has been artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Fountainhead Residency, Skopelos Foundation for Arts, Bharat Bhavan Graphic Studio, and Centre d’Art-Marnay Art Centre. She has exhibited at ASU Art Museum, Weatherspoon Museum, and Poetry Foundation, among others. In 2018, the Detroit Institute of Arts commissioned Vedpathak’s work for their new South Asian wing. Her works will be featured in a solo exhibition at Flint Art Institute in 2021.

April 6: Ann Eskridge, Jeni De La O, Rochelle Marrett

Ann Eskridge’s passion for African American history explores, through fiction, playwriting, and screenwriting, the Underground Railroad; all-Black towns in Oklahoma; and the Pekin Theater, the first Black musical theater. Eskridge was a broadcast journalist before becoming a freelance writer and teacher. She has dabbled in politics, working for a Republican lieutenant governor and a Democratic Detroit city council president. She also helped develop the mass media program at Golightly Career and Technical Center, and worked as a speechwriter. Throughout all these career moves, she wrote.

Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. Her poems have been published by Wayne State Literary Review, Columbia Journal, Glass Poetry, Sugar House Review, and others. De La O co-founded the Estuary Collective with three other Black femme poets and together they offer free programming and a safe space for emerging writers of color online. She is a poetry editor for Kissing Dynamite Poetry, has toured the country performing with the Moth Mainstage, and writes BROWN STUDY, a monthly poetry column at THE POETRY QUESTION.

Rochelle Marrett is a Jamaican fiction writer whose work seeks to be both an ode to her country and a critical examination of certain socio-political sentiments. Her writing also strives to articulate the everyday complexities of Black immigrant life in a compelling and unsettling manner that disrupts long-held assumptions. Marrett was recently named a MacDowell Fellow and a 2021 Pen America Emerging Voices Fellow. In 2019, she was a Room Project Fellow in Detroit. Her work has been long-listed for the 2021 Disquiet Fiction Prize, received residency support from Tin House, and workshop support from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, among others. Marrett holds a BA in English from The College of Wooster, where she graduated with honors. Currently, she resides in metro Detroit with her husband and daughter and is at work on her debut novel.

March 25: Bakpak Durden and MARS Marshall

Bakpak Durden, born in Detroit, is an interdisciplinary fine artist. Durden employs a wide range of media—oil and acrylic paint, graphite, and fine art photography—to construct their hyperrealistic and conceptual works of art. Durden’s artworks illuminate the complexity and precarity of human emotion and identity by meticulously examining their own. Durden is self-taught and inspired by the baroque painting style and the language of cinema. Their artwork has been shown both nationally and internationally. They have also completed a number of murals across the nation, including one for the GUCCI VS EVERYBODY campaign. 

MARS Marshall is a writer and cultural organizer born, raised, and based in Detroit. Their work intimately explores desire and longing through the lens of reclaiming the Black Trans body. Marshall is a Lambda Literary Arts Emerging Writers Fellow in poetry and a Crescendo Literary Art Poetry Incubator Fellow. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Foglifter Journal, Gertrude Press, the Shade Journal, the Lambda Literary Art anthology Emerge, and elsewhere. Marshall currently serves as the director of the Allied Media Conference.

March 11: Darcel Deneau, Ijania Cortez

Ijania Cortez (b. Detroit, MI 1990) is a self-taught fine artist living and working in Detroit. Her practice is centralized around painting, but also includes murals and mixed media works. She is known for her use of color and for the subjects her portraits depict—exclusively Black men from the inner city. Influenced by a modest childhood in ‘90s Detroit and her love for the residents there, her work serves to create conversations between painting and viewer. In her practice, Cortez uses neon color to note the contemporary era, showing her subjects as natural and central in environments that are unnatural, a reflection of the man-made conditions of the city. Her work interrogates beauty and vulnerability in masculinity, as well as the ability to thrive and exist despite adversity. She hosted her first solo exhibition, a Summer Nativity, in July 2017.

Detroit has been a source of inspiration for Darcel Deneau for nearly 20 years. Using glass and objects she finds around the city, she builds images of Detroit that parallel its current growth, finding that there’s a striking similarity between the approach to her process and Detroit’s transformation. Her work has been widely collected and publicly displayed. Last year, Deneau’s work was recognized as best in show at the Anton Art Center’s 2020 MI Fine Arts Competition, juried by Detroit Institute of Arts Director, Salvador Salort-Pons, and she has placed in the award category of the annual College for Creative Studies Alumni Exhibition for 3 years in a row.

March 4: Ana Gavrilovska and Donnevan Tolbert

Born and raised in Hamtramck, Ana Gavrilovska writes stories about music and art. After a pit stop living in the suburbs, she returned to Detroit as soon as she could, earning an English degree from Wayne State University. She’s been involved in the music scene as a fan for much longer, but never considered combining her passions—music and words—until she wandered into the field of music journalism as a freelancer for Detroit Metro Times. Since then, Gavrilovska has carved out an idiosyncratic path as an arts and culture writer with print magazine features, artist interviews, liner notes, album reviews, online content, artist bios, and more.

Donnevan Tolbert has been writing plays and short stories since he was a child. While attending Wayne State University, Tolbert submitted his play This Don’t Make You Cool to the 2017 Louise Heck-Rabi Scholarship Playwriting Competition and it won first place. When the play was produced and performed, he knew that writing was a part of his calling. Tolbert writes music, poetry, plays, and short stories—it is his most genuine and fulfilling form of expression. As a young Black man, he feels that much is required of him from birth. Tolbert grew up in a single-parent home and his daily mission is to make a way for his mom to retire early in life.

February 23: Zig Zag Claybourne, Solomon Johnson, B. Van Randall

Zig Zag Claybourne is the author of The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan and its sequel, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe. Other works include By All Our Violent Guides, Neon Lights, the short story collection Historical Inaccuracies, and the inspirational book In the Quiet Spaces. His stories and essays on sci fi, fandom, and life have appeared in Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, GigaNotosaurus, Strange Horizons, and other genre venues, as well as the 42 blog at writeonrighton.com. He grew up watching The Twilight Zone and considers himself a better person for it.

Solomon Johnson is a Detroit-born and raised artist. As a child, his mother wrote and illustrated several children’s stories while encouraging his artistic exploration. Years later, his professional career began as a product designer creating auto interiors for General Motors at Henry Dreyfuss & Associates and Lear Corporation. In 2015, his youngest daughter inspired him to write a children’s story. Ultimately, this led him to author a four-part series. Currently, Johnson’s time and energy are devoted to illustrating his first children’s book, Daddy, Where Do the Animals on the Train Go?  

B. Van Randall is a writer and creator of unique graphic novels and comic books. He seeks to tell compelling and captivating stories of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and action that feature African American (and other people of color) and LGBTQ leads as opposed to telling simply “Black stories.” He founded Verse Comics USA in 2017 and his company has published eight titles to date (some of which are award-winning).

February 16: Sabrina Nelson, Cinnamon Triano, Graem Whyte

Sabrina Nelson was born on the heels of the ‘67 Detroit Rebellion. She has been creating art professionally for over 36 years, exhibiting in the Midwest, South Florida, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and Paris. Nelson has worked in arts administration at the College for Creative Studies and at the Detroit Institute of Arts for over 25 years. She sees herself as a visual witness to the tumultuous times she lives in and, as a self-identified Artivist, reflects this in her work. She is also committed to mentoring young artists and designers in the business of making it as an artist.

Cinnamon Triano is a documentary filmmaker and artist living in Detroit. In 2012, she received her BFA in video and film arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She spent the next few years traveling internationally to work on cinéma vérité projects, often living with her documentary subjects long-term and filming their everyday lives. Triano works professionally as a camera operator and producer on documentary films and commercial content. Using drawn and photographed elements, she also creates surreal portraits and animated video collages. Recently, she worked as an associate producer on the horror feature “We Need To Do Something,” and a field producer on the Netflix Docuseries “Cheer.”  

Based in Hamtramck, Graem Whyte is an artist born and raised in metro Detroit. His work utilizes a wide array of materials and fuses sculpture, architecture, installation, and relational art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has received several awards for his work. He is the co-founder and artistic director of the arts venue, Popps Packing, and teaches foundry at the College for Creative Studies.

February 9: Tariq Luthun and Jassmine Parks

Tariq Luthun is a Detroit-born community organizer, data consultant, and Emmy Award-winning poet. The son of Palestinian Muslim immigrants from Gaza, he earned his MFA in poetry from the program for writers at Warren Wilson College and currently serves as board member and development coordinator of the Offing Literary Magazine following a two-year stint as editor of the micro department. His work has appeared in venues like Lit Hub, Vinyl Poetry, Mizna, and Button Poetry, and has earned him distinctions such as Best of the Net and fellowships with the Watering Hole and Kundiman. His first collection of poems, HOW THE WATER HOLDS ME, was awarded editors’ choice by Bull City Press and is available now. 

Jassmine Parks is a spoken word poet and slam champion from Detroit. Her work examines the resiliency of the Black feminine experience and intergenerational trauma, and attempts to explore, heal, and disrupt unhealthy cycles such as abuse, mass incarceration, and court ordered parent-child separation. Parks, also a dedicated educator, serves as the lead teaching artist of InsideOut Literary Arts. She believes in the power of language to reflect on past experiences, build agency, and activate healing. Her work has been published with SlamFind and All Def Poetry.