The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit or CAID is a community based non-profit organization. CAID fosters and promotes the link between contemporary arts and contemporary society through exhibitions, performances, critical and public discourse and the funding of contemporary arts and art related activities.
John Sousanis is publisher and co-founder of TheDetroiter.com. John served as an entertainment writer, theater critic, and weekly columnist for the Oakland Press from 1996 through 2003. He is the co-author of Constitutional Amendments: From Freedom of Speech to Flag Burning, a three-volume history of the process and politics surrounding ratified and proposed amendments to the US Constitution. Born in Michigan, John is an alumnus of Harvard University. Sousanis has authored two plays that were produced by Planet Ant Theatre in Hamtramck, Michigan. As of 2005, he serves as president of the Board of Directors of Meadow Brook Theatre Ensemble, Michigan's largest professional theater.
Walter Nickell "Nick" Sousanis is an American scholar, art critic, and cartoonist; a co-founder of the TheDetroiter.com, he is also the first person at Columbia University to write a dissertation entirely in a comic book format.
Sharon Que (Querciagrossa) is an American visual artist and luthier, based in Ann Arbor, specializing in violin restoration and repair.
Karl Zerbe was a German-born American painter and educator.
Tom Phardel is an American artist born in Detroit to Sicilian immigrants. Some of his works and fine ceramics are owned by a number of important American institutions, including the Everson Museum in Syracuse, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Dennos Museum Center.
Tyree Guyton is an artist from Detroit, Michigan. He is married to Jenenne Whitfield and continues to live in Detroit. Before becoming an artist, Guyton worked as a firefighter and an autoworker and served in the U.S. Army. He studied art at Marygrove College, Wayne State University, and the Center for Creative Studies—now College for Creative Studies. Guyton counts his grandfather, Sam Mackey, and Detroit artist Charles McGee as his greatest influences.
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.
Nick Cave is an American sculptor, dancer, performance artist, and professor. He is best known for his Soundsuit series: wearable assemblage fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly, often made with found objects. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey and often incorporates dance and performance into his works. His later sculptures have focused on color theory and included mixed media and large-scale installations. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, and directs the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
Richard Ritter is an American studio glass artist who lives in North Carolina.
Detroit Artists Market (DAM) is the oldest continuously running non profit gallery in the Midwest. The DAM is a contemporary art gallery in Detroit, Michigan located in the cultural Midtown neighborhood near the Detroit Institute of Arts and Wayne State University.
Lester Johnson was an American artist and educator. Johnson was a member of the Second Generation of the New York School during the late 1950s. The subject of much of his work is the human figure. His style is considered by critics and art historians to be in the figurative expressionist mode.
Michele Oka Doner is an American artist and author who works in a variety of media including sculpture, prints, drawings, functional objects and video. She has also worked in costume and set design and has created over 40 public and private permanent art installations, including “A Walk On The Beach,” a one and a quarter mile long bronze and terrazzo concourse at Miami International Airport.
Kate Clark is a New York-based sculptor, residing and working in Brooklyn. Her work synthesizes human faces with the bodies of animals. Clark's preferred medium is animal hide. Mary Logan Barmeyer says Clark's work is "meant to make you think twice about what it means to be human, and furthermore, what it means to be animal." Writer Monica Ramirez-Montagut says Clark's works "reclaim storytelling and vintage techniques as strategies to address contemporary discourses on welfare, the environment, and female struggles."
The University of Michigan Detroit Center is a community outreach center, meeting/events facility, and academic home base for University of Michigan units, located in Midtown Detroit.
Steve Locke is an American artist who explores figuration and perceptions of the male figure, and themes of masculinity and homosexuality through drawing, painting, sculpture and installation art. He lives and works in upstate New York and in Brooklyn where he teaches at Pratt Institute.
David Courlander was a self-taught ("primitive") artist who painted scenes of everyday American life. He began painting when he was 85 years old. Many of his paintings now reside in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection and have been put on public display as part of various Smithsonian art exhibitions.
Maya Stovall is an American conceptual artist and anthropologist. Stovall is best known for her use of ballet and public space in her art practice. She is associate professor, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Peter Beresford Williams was an American painter, educator, and social activist. His paintings have been described by writer and artist William Eckhardt Kohler as "in no particular order: hallucinogenic, acerbic, pained, beautiful, confessional, obsessive, critical, jarring, wild, weird, and profoundly human". In 2020, Williams received the Artists' Legacy Foundation Artist Award.
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.
5. Voss, Elizabeth (June 20, 2008). ["YMCA buys thedetroiter.com."] DetroitMakeItHere.com. YMCA buys thedetroiter.com Retrieved 2010-04-17.
