Excerpt from newly published book about Kresge and Detroit explores the importance of supporting artists and cultural institutions in elevating the vibrant arts and culture scene

The Kresge Foundation’s investments in individual artist support are delivering abundant, clear, and positive impacts on Fellowship award recipients, the Detroit arts ecosystem, and civic leaders and infrastructure. Evidence shows that Kresge’s work has improved artists’ lives, accelerated their career trajectories, opened new possibilities in their art-making practice and boosted their confidence as creators.

— 2016 report on Kresge’s arts efforts

Near the end of 2015, Artsy, a popular website for artists and collectors, published a list of that year’s “15 Most Influential Art World Cities.” At No. 15 on the list, just below Istanbul, Beijing, and Brussels, was Detroit, “lauded as America’s Berlin.” (The actual Berlin registered considerably higher, at No. 6). The only American cities higher on the list than Detroit were New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Rankings of this sort are more sport than science, but one thing that most of these cities have in common—and something especially striking for Detroit—is that art and culture are an integral part of the cities’ economies, near the core of their appeal to incoming residents and businesses. In such places as New York (No. 1) and London (No. 2)—and even more so in smaller places like Miami (No. 3), Venice (No. 4), and Basel, Switzerland (No. 8)—the arts are more than a feature, an ornament on the overall quality of life. The arts are part of the brand, a key reason to want to live and work there. Detroit’s appearance on such a list signaled a remarkable change in its profile—both in its self-image and in the face it presents to the world.

To be sure, people who value a rich arts environment have long found Detroit a satisfying place to be. Its venerable downtown and Midtown arts institutions—the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Opera, and the newer Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, among others—are all of national stature. Some four hundred other venues, including music clubs, performance spaces, and galleries around the metropolitan area, have made for a vigorous and lively cultural scene. Among many other musical distinctions, Detroit is the ancestral home of Motown; has been a longtime hotbed of jazz, soul, and R&B; was an early laboratory of funk in the 1970s; and, later, in the 1980s, was the birthplace of techno. Even in its hardest times, Detroit’s wealth of culture, writ large and small, helped to soften the rougher edges of its image. Still, for most of its history, it was an industrial capital rich in arts and culture. It was not an arts capital.

For nearly all its ninety-plus years, The Kresge Foundation has been a leading national supporter of the arts, including in Detroit, but not, until recently, a champion of the Detroit arts scene in particular. Until 2007, the Foundation supported arts organizations in much the same way that it supported other major nonprofits: by contributing to capital campaigns that created important new facilities and helped strengthen the organizations that developed them. By the turn of the twenty-first century, all of Detroit’s large cultural institutions had benefited from this kind of Kresge largesse at some point or other, often in impressive sums. Smaller arts organizations were much scarcer on the Foundation’s list of grantees.

In mid-2006, Rip Rapson arrived at The Kresge Foundation from Minneapolis, a city similar to Detroit in at least one respect: it is an international business hub with a vibrant arts scene. He therefore found Detroit’s cultural energy and variety familiar, despite the city’s far worse economic conditions. As was true in Minneapolis, he found cultural institutions playing a noteworthy part in Detroit’s economic development, particularly in downtown and Midtown. A cultural district had been emerging in Midtown since at least the late 1980s, when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra moved back to its historic home in the neighborhood, after more than three decades at an acoustically inferior location on the riverfront. The orchestra’s commitment to Midtown—including its later partnership with the nearby Detroit Medical Center on the block-long office development known as Orchestra Place—was one of the first signs that the budding cultural revival downtown might spread northward.

What Rapson did not find in Detroit, at that point, was a cohesive system of leadership, support, and funding for arts and artists—he calls it an “ecosystem”—in which larger institutions support smaller ones; cutting-edge organizations incubate new talent and forms of expression for wider consumption; funders, government, and civic leaders collaborate on providing financial and moral support to the creative environment; longtime artists and presenters mentor newer ones; and individual artists and cultural organizations play an influential role in most aspects of the city’s common life, including economic and community development. That kind of integration and self-reinforcement had been fundamental in Minneapolis, and a key reason for its thriving arts scene. Rapson described this integrated system metaphorically as a kind of cultivated wetland, where “eddies of ideas and activities push into other parts of the ecology, down to individual artists and up to more formal institutions, a dynamic, calibrated ecology in which, though each component part has a distinct identity and purpose, there’s a porousness to talent, funding, audience development—all just pushing around and through the environment constantly.”

In Detroit, by contrast, it seemed as if artists and the organizations in which they worked were essentially left to their own devices—sometimes celebrated, not usually obstructed, but largely fending for themselves. The largest institutions enjoyed a measure of corporate support and gifts from wealthy individuals, and some well-established smaller organizations had loyal sponsors and patrons—though even then, their income barely reached subsistence levels in a struggling economy whose dominant industry was in free fall. As for the newer, less well-known, and more remote cultural establishments, and most of the city’s individual artists, survival was a year-to-year affair, consisting mostly of competing for scraps.

In 2000 and again in 2002, metro Detroit voters had defeated ballot measures that would have created a regional fund for culture through a small increase in the property tax. While the 2002 defeat was heartbreakingly narrow—suggesting a bedrock of support for the arts that was larger than many had imagined, even if not a majority—supporters were despondent over the back-to-back defeats. Later, in a round of severe budget cuts in 2005, the city’s once-influential Department of Arts and Cultural Affairs was abolished, thus silencing city hall’s official voice for Detroit’s creative sector. Amid the despondency during the lean years, Rapson’s plea for a richer cultural “ecosystem” struck even some of the city’s more ardent arts supporters as fanciful. “He introduced that term to Detroit,” Michael Hodges, fine arts writer for the Detroit News, remembered several years later. “I’d never heard it before. It was certainly true that something artistic was happening in Detroit, and it wasn’t limited to downtown or Midtown. It was happening in all kinds of unlikely places, out in neighborhoods, in largely abandoned areas. And it was happening without any real glue or support system to hold it together.” Call it a system or an ecology or a creative network—pick your metaphor—Hodges remembered Rapson’s plea for coherence resonating with people in creative Detroit, even in the midst of a prevailing doubt that anything could be accomplished on a large scale.

Roughly six months after Rapson arrived at The Kresge Foundation, he was scheduled to address the inaugural meeting of the Cultural Alliance of Southeastern Michigan, a membership association of thirty-two organizations that made up the regional creative economy. (Renamed CultureSource in 2013, it grew to a collective of more than one hundred fifty members before going out of business.) The occasion, at the newly opened Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, called for a few ceremonial remarks, commending the formation of the Cultural Alliance and celebrating the new museum, which Kresge had supported with one of its traditional capital challenge grants. Instead, with no prepared remarks and giving no notice to the group, Rapson set off a rhetorical roman candle. He announced that The Kresge Foundation would soon launch a program of general operating support for cultural organizations of all sorts and, more remarkable still, annual grant awards to individual artists. Detroit had never seen anything remotely comparable to either idea.

“That just electrified the arts community,” one person at the meeting said years later. “Everyone’s jaw dropped. General support? Individual artists? Did we just hear what we thought we heard?”

The operating grants for organizations, although unprecedented, would be modest in size, compared with what might have flowed from the defeated tax millage for the arts. (The largest regional institutions stood to draw up to $4 million a year from the millage; Kresge’s largest operating support grant would be $100,000.) But the prospect of an unrestricted grant for general operations—flexible working capital that organizations could spend on their own needs and unexpected opportunities, rather than accommodating the priorities of a funder—made them many times more valuable than the raw numbers might imply, especially for the smaller, less-famous venues.

Making grants to individual artists was an even more radical idea, according to Mark Stryker, longtime arts writer and critic at the Free Press. “No one had ever done that here in Detroit before,” he said, “or even talked about doing it. And you cannot overstate how important that has been, and how much it changed the whole landscape.” At $25,000 each, the fellowships Rapson was promising would hardly make anyone financially independent. But, with no strings attached, the grants could make it possible for up to twenty artists a year to quit a second job or retire debt, to take some months off for full-time creative work, to buy equipment and supplies, to travel, or to renovate and modify a workspace—luxuries beyond the reach of most of the city’s artists, writers, and performers.

To read more, visit Embracing a City’s website and order the book. You can find additional excerpts:

• Chapter 1 excerpt: The quiet launch of 1993’s Detroit Initiative changed Kresge and the city where it was founded
• Chapter 2 excerpt: The Woodward Corridor, from riverfront to Midtown, was key to advancing Detroit’s revitalization
• Chapter 3 excerpt: Focusing on neighborhoods beyond the city’s core became an imperative
• Chapter 4 excerpt: The unlikely connection between Superbowl XL and the creation of Detroit’s M-1 Rail