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.
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 Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building is a class-A skyscraper located at 477 Michigan Avenue in Downtown Detroit, Michigan, designed by the Detroit architectural firm of Smith, Hinchman and Grylls. It opened in 1976 to consolidate the offices of federal agencies which were scattered in several locations in the area. It houses offices of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Army Corps of Engineers, Defense Contract Management Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD), Internal Revenue Service, Peace Corps, Railroad Retirement Board, Veteran Affairs (VA), The American Legion Department of Michigan and Social Security Administration. It is named for Patrick V. McNamara, a Democratic United States Senator from the State of Michigan from 1955 to 1966. It has recently suffered a legionella outbreak.
TheDetroiter.com is a website providing articles, blogs, interviews, a calendar of events and editorials for the Detroit, Michigan arts and cultural community. Its motto is "Unearthing a great American city, one story at a time."
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.
Graem Whyte is an American sculptor and gallerist. White was born and raised in metropolitan Detroit and now lives in Hamtramck, Michigan.
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.
The Cultural Center Historic District is a historic district located in Detroit, Michigan, which includes the Art Center : the Detroit Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Horace H. Rackham Education Memorial Building were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The district contains several cultural attractions.
The Metropolitan Center for High Technology, formerly S. S. Kresge World Headquarters, is an office building located at 2727 Second Avenue in Midtown Detroit, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1979. The office building is now part of Wayne State University and used as a business incubator for startup companies.
Culture jamming is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of mass society.
Hoyt W. Fuller was an American editor, educator, critic, and author during the Black Arts Movement. Fuller created the Organization of Black American Culture in Chicago. In addition, he taught creative writing and African-American literature at Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, and Cornell University.
Alvin Bernard Aubert was a professor of English, poet, playwright, editor, literary critic, and scholar who championed African-American culture and rural life along the southern Mississippi River. He grew up in Lutcher, Louisiana, and attended Southern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois. He taught at Southern University, SUNY Fredonia,University of Oregon, and Wayne State University. At WSU he was a professor of English, taught creative writing and Afro-American literature, while serving as Interim Chair of the Department of Africana Studies. He founded and edited the award winning journal Obsidian, now Obsidian II, for publishing works in English by, and about, writes of African descent worldwide. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in literature (1955), and a Bread Loaf Scholar in poetry (1968). His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including regular reviews of Afro-American poetry books in Cornell University's "Epoch" magazine. His play, "Home From Harlem," was staged at WSU's Bonstelle Theatre in 1986, and in 1991 he completed his play, "Piney Brown." He served as an advisory editor to literary magazines and served on grants panels for New York's Creative Artist Public Service Program (CAPS), the National Endowment for the Arts, the Coordinating Council for Literary Magazines (CCLM), the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Detroit City Arts Council. He was a member of the College Language Association, the Black Theatre Network, and the Langston Hughes Society.
Gilda Snowden was an African-American artist, educator and mentor from Detroit, Michigan.
Hubert Massey is an artist of a variety of mediums, and well known for his large-scale installations in the Buon Fresco style. Massey has 15 works of public art throughout the state of Michigan, and has been commissioned by various local organizations including universities, museums, hotels, and the Michigan Department of Transportation. He now resides in Detroit, Michigan with his wife Marquita.
Michael Zadoorian is an American novelist and short story writer of Armenian descent. Zadoorian's work explores love, death, music, memory, things forgotten and found again, the eidetic power of photographic images, and Detroit. He is best known as the author of The Leisure Seeker, published in 2009 by William Morrow and Company. In 2018, it was adapted for a motion picture starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, and directed by Italian film director Paolo Virzi. The film was released in March 2018.
Nancy Mitchnick is an American painter and educator. She most notably started as part of Detroit's Cass Corridor Group.
Bill Rauhauser was an American photographer and educator who documented the city of Detroit from the 1940s.
Richard "Rip" Rapson is an American attorney and philanthropist serving as CEO of the Kresge Foundation. He began his career as a congressional aide to Donald M. Fraser during Fraser's last two terms in the United States House of Representatives. After attending Columbia Law School, Rapson joined the law firm of Leonard, Street & Deinard to practice law while also serving on the board of several organizations. In 1989, Fraser, who had become mayor of Minneapolis, appointed Rapson as his deputy mayor and, in 1993, Rapson unsuccessfully ran for mayor to succeed Fraser.
Dora Apel is an American art historian, cultural critic, author, and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she taught from 1994 to 2019. Her work focuses on issues of trauma, memory, race, gender, national identity, war, and the negative impacts of capitalism. Her book, Calling Memory into Place, includes essays that delineate her family's history during and after the Holocaust. Two of her books address the history of lynching black people in the United States.
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 Woodson's work. A painting by Woodson is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit exhibition "Ground Up: Reflections on Black Abstraction" April 8-August 16, 2022.
