Sebastian Spering Kresge was an American businessman. He created and owned two chains of department stores, the S. S. Kresge Company, one of the 20th century's largest discount retail organizations, and the Kresge-Newark traditional department store chain. The discounter was renamed the Kmart Corporation in 1977.
Dorothy Jeanne Thompson, better known as Dorothy Ashby, was an American jazz harpist, singer and composer. Hailed as one of the most "unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950s" and the "most accomplished modern jazz harpist," Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, beyond earlier use as a novelty or background orchestral instrument, proving the harp could play bebop as adeptly as the instruments commonly associated with jazz, such as the saxophone or piano.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
The Detroit Medical Center (DMC) is a for-profit alliance of hospitals that encompasses over 2,000 licensed beds, 3,000 affiliated physicians and over 12,000 employees. Located in Midtown Detroit, the DMC is affiliated with medical schools from Wayne State University and Michigan State University. Detroit Medical Center hospitals are staffed by physicians from the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine and the Wayne State University School of Medicine, the largest single-campus medical school in the United States and the nation's fourth largest medical school overall. The Detroit Medical Center is fully accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
Charles McGee was an American artist and educator known for creating paintings, assemblages, and sculptures. His artwork is in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. He also had several large-scale public works in the city of Detroit.
Gwen Lux Creighton professionally Gwen Lux, (1908–2001) was an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She was among America’s pioneer women sculptors.
Jessica R. Suchy-Pilalis is an American specialist in the theory and practice of Byzantine chant, Byzantine singer, composer, harpist, and music educator.
Terry Peake is an American composer, record producer, multi-instrumentalist and owner of Robot Academy Music.
Leni Sinclair, born Magdalene Arndt, is an American photographer and radical political activist. She has photographed rock and jazz musicians since the early 1960s. She was the co-founder of the White Panther Party along with John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon. She lives in Detroit.
Ara Topouzian is an Armenian musician who began playing Armenian and Middle Eastern music in 1991. He plays the kanon.
Gilda Snowden was an African-American artist, educator and mentor from Detroit, Michigan.
Shiva Ahmadi is an Iranian-born American artist, known for her paintings, videos, and installations. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in North America and the Middle East.
Nancy Mitchnick is an American painter and educator. She most notably started as part of Detroit's Cass Corridor Group.
Ruth Adler Schnee is an American textile designer and interior designer based in Michigan. Schnee is best known for her modern prints and abstract-patterns of organic and geometric forms. She opened the Ruth Adler-Schnee Design Studio with her spouse Edward Schnee in Detroit, which operated until 1960. The studio produced textiles and later branched off into Adler-Schnee Associates home decor, interiors and furniture.
Patricia Hill Burnett, born Patricia Hill, was an American portrait artist and women's rights activist.
Bill Rauhauser was an American photographer and educator who documented the city of Detroit from the 1940s.
Ahya Simone is an American multidisciplinary artist. Based in Detroit, she is best known for her work as a harpist and for creating and starring in the web series Femme Queen Chronicles.
Shirley Woodson is an American visual artist, educator, mentor, and art collector who is most known for her spectacular figurative paintings depicting African American history. Her work that spans a career of 60 years and counting can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. Woodson was named the 2021 Kresge Eminent Artist. The Detroit Institute of Arts exhibited 11 of her pieces in "Shirley Woodson: Shield of the Nile" Dec. 18, 2021 through June 12, 2022, the museum's first solo exhibition of Ms. Woodson's work. A painting by Ms. Woodson is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit exhibition "Ground Up: Reflections on Black Abstraction" April 8-August 16, 2022.
Marie Woo is a Chinese-American ceramicist and educator.
Patricia Shontz was an American economist, columnist, businesswoman, and academic.
