Red Bull Arts Detroit, the experimental arts program and exhibition space located in the historic E&B Brewery in the city’s Eastern Market, has named the nine artists who will participate in its recently expanded residency program and the recipients of its new writing and curatorial fellowships. Red Bull Arts revealed that it planned to ramp up its contemporary art initiatives in Detroit earlier this year.

According to the organization, the 2019 residency and fellowship cycle will give artists, curators, writers, and thinkers the space, time, and resources necessary to push their practices forward. Selected from a pool of 665 artists, seventy-nine curators, and seventy-seven writers, the sixteen awardees will be provided with access to a 14,000-square-foot studio space and on-site living accommodations. They will also be introduced to Detroit’s creative community and will have the opportunity to engage with visiting curators and writers. Each residency cycle will culminate in a group exhibition.

The selection committee comprised ​Deana Haggag​, president and CEO of United States Artists; Detroit native and poet ​Airea D. Matthews​; ​Lucy Mensah​, visiting assistant professor of museum and exhibition studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago; independent curator ​Laura Raicovich​, the former president and executive director of the Queens Museum in New York; and dancer and choreographer John Michael Schert​.

“I love the range of this program—from the span of practice, to the resources it provides, to how it simultaneously supports artists working in Detroit as well as welcomes those from elsewhere to be in residence in a remarkable city,” Haggag said​. “We’re all very excited about the first cohort of artists, writers, and curators selected to inaugurate the residency, and are animated by each of their practices individually and the breadth they represent collectively.”

Raicovich added: “It wasn’t easy to narrow the field, but the residents selected reveal a great deal about the concerns and interests of artists working right now, and the urgencies they seek to address through an extraordinary diversity of means and craft. I can’t wait to see what each of them does with their time in residence.”

Working in a diverse range of disciplines, including performance art, wearable sculpture, new media, dance, photography, and ceramics, and with areas of focus such as postcolonial identity politics, the African diaspora, consumerism, standards of economic vitality, and the material culture of ’90s hip-hop, the awardees are as follows:

Artists-in-Residence

Holly Bass​

Pamela Council​

Kearra Amaya Gopee​

​Miatta Kawinzi

Claire Lachow​

​Tiff Massey​

​Michael Polakowski​

Patrick Quarm​

Hui-Ying Tsai​

Visiting Writing Fellows ​

Dana Bassett​

Andrew Berardini​

Brian Droitcour​

William E. Jones​

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko​

Ruslana Lichtzier​

Curatorial Fellow

Taraneh Fazeli​