The ArtClvb team (from left) Jay Norman, Dorota Coy, Kara Barnes and Steve Coy/Photo: ArtClvb
Every September, design creatives across Detroit—from newly minted studios to established companies to arts institutions—come together to show off their latest projects in a series of events called Detroit Month of Design. Cross-disciplinary events take place in all corners of the city, highlighting the talent and innovation that makes Detroit a UNESCO City of Design. This year, ArtClvb, a new fine art and tech start-up that aims to change the way artists and collectors experience and interact through exhibition, sales and social networking is organizing and presenting Art Fair | Detroit, from September 27-29.
ArtClvb, sponsored by the global venture platform Newlab as part of the newly opened Michigan Central innovation district backed by Ford Motor Company, has developed an app that will support sales and online representation for the multi-artist, multi-venue exhibition. One of several goals for the three-day event is to provide proof of concept for this app-based market network that combines online social interaction, profile building and sales features. Visitors to the exhibitions can download the app to get information on the work and artists on display and to make art purchases. The app also allows users to create their own profiles of work they themselves have collected, created or curated. All of these features will be provided at a fraction of the cost associated with representation by commercial galleries.
Claudia Rivera Plaza, “¿Y cuantos eran? Cinco,” 2024, paint and markers on unstretched canvas/Photo: Claudia Rivera Plaza and ArtClvb.
ArtClvb is the brainchild of conceptual artists Dorota and Steve Coy (also known as Hygienic Dress League). The Coys are inveterate experimenters and serial innovators whose many projects are based on their ongoing critique of twenty-first-century corporate capitalism. Their portfolio includes murals that ironically comment on commercial promotion and surrealist installations featuring gilded gas masks, levitating pyramids and creatures of myth. Recently they ventured into the area of blockchain technology and NFTs to hilarious effect. The ArtClvb app grows naturally out of their preoccupation with corporate capitalism and a sincere desire to support creatives in an art ecosystem that often exploits and devalues their talent. As Dorota Coy explained in a recent interview, “Steve and I, we’re artists as well, we understand firsthand what it’s like to be an artist. It’s hard to put your heart and soul into something and not get as much out of it. So we thought, can we change the model a little bit, where the artists make most of the money since they created the work? Could that work?”
Detroit artist and Art Fair | Detroit exhibitor Cyrah Dardas added this, “I am always intrigued by folks who are attempting to make a change they feel is needed. I like that ArtClvb is made for artists by artists to create a new solution to how people can connect authentically.”
The work represented in Art Fair | Detroit is diverse in media and genre, and conceptually heterodox. Exhibitors, while they include artists at every stage of their careers from emerging to eminent, skew young and ethnically diverse. This year’s participants often have personal connections to Detroit, but others are visiting from Chicago, New York City, Toronto, Europe and Japan, to name only a few. Recent graduates of Detroit’s art schools, such as Claudia Rivera Plaza, Shaina Kasztelan and Kaleigh Blevins, will share space with more established artists like talented Toledo painter Yusuf Lateef and visual satirist Mary-Ann Monforton.
Kaleigh Blevins, “Our Glory,” 2024, oil, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 24”/Photo: C. J. Benninger
Even exhibitors who identify as Detroit artists often have global ties. Ivan Montoya, raised on the city’s southwest side, was born in 1988 in Chihuahua, Mexico, and brings a hybrid consciousness to his murals, installations and paintings. Vaughn Taormina, a native Detroiter, recently returned from earning his BFA from Cooper Union in New York City to paint local cityscapes in flat, saturated hues as heightened scenes of everyday disaster.
The Art Fair | Detroit venues are clustered in the downtown area, starting with ample space at Newlab. (The building, originally a post office designed by Detroit architect Albert Kahn, was bought in 2018 by Ford Motor Company to form a central part of their Michigan Central campus.) The Milwaukee Junction and Islandview neighborhoods, both up-and-coming locations for creatives and makers, will host additional works by over 180 participating artists throughout five locations.
Now in its fourteenth year, Detroit Month of Design gathers designers, artists, consumers and the community to showcase the grit, resilience and creative ambition born of the city’s unique (and admittedly checkered) history. As part of this celebration, Art Fair| Detroit and the new ArtClvb app will provide a point of local contact and a catalyst for growing connections in Detroit and beyond. ArtClvb co-founder Dorota Coy describes the group’s vision: “The art world has been thought of as elite, so what we want to do is [demonstrate] that everybody can be part of it and everybody belongs to it… it’s an ecosystem that only works when we all participate in it, making things a little bit more cohesive and making things a little bit more collaborative… so that everybody benefits.”
Art Fair | Detroit organized by ArtClvb takes place September 27-29 at various locations across Detroit, Michigan. More information here.
