Vans, El Club team up for custom sneaker during COVID-19 crisis

The sneaker is designed by Freddy Diaz, a Southwest Detroit artist known as SW Freddy, who got the call from El Club last week to put together a design and pulled an all-nighter to get it done on deadline. Diaz is also working on an upcoming gallery show which is set to do a virtual opening on April 17.
"It was literally crunch mode times three," Diaz says.

For his latest solo exhibition, Detroit photographer Kenny Karpov took to the Mediterranean Sea for a closer look at Europe's refugee crisis.

Many of the photos show Black bodies packed onto ship decks, calling to mind a modern-day slave ship. What gets lost in the mainstream media narrative of the refugees, Karpov believes, is that any of the African and Middle Eastern refugees are in fact fleeing the horrors of modern-day slavery, human trafficking, famine, and war.

Looking through his lens, photographer Kenny Karpov tries to capture who people truly are — their expressions, their bodies and the light in their eyes. His emotional portraits, paired with written work, tell their stories.

In Karpov’s latest project, the book “Despite It All We Never Learn,” he tells the stories of refugees, the real people going through travails on a journey toward better and safer lives.

Internationally acclaimed photographer and Detroit resident Kenny Karpov joins us to talk about his upcoming photo exhibit, “Despite It All, We Never Learn.”

The photos take you on a journey with Karpov on a refugee boat in the Mediterranean. It’s quite the story, and the opening event is at M Contemporary Gallery in Ferndale.

In first exhibition of his drawings in five years, Rucker explores the connections between rock pigeons and African-American males — “marginalized person, marginalized animal,” says Rucker.

A background in storytelling and photography plays a big part in Rashaun Rucker's art, which he uses to direct attention to critical social issues.

The Vanguard Artist Collective is a semi-formal nod to pioneering Chicago-based black art collectives like the Organization of Black American Culture and AfriCOBRA, which were founded during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“We push each other to be better artists and better people — even when it’s critical,” says Rucker.

BRIAN DAY’S LANDSCAPES ARE AT FERNDALE’S M CONTEMPORARY ART THROUGH AUG. 17

Detroit photojournalist Kenny Karpov has been back in the city since January, after spending the past several years documenting war-torn and ravaged parts of the world that most of us only see on the news.

Karpov has lived those experiences, in the Middle East and the Central Mediterranean Sea, and now he’s working to share all that he experienced — and photographed — in a forthcoming exhibition and book titled, “Despite It All We Never Learn.”

Kresge Arts in Detroit has named the 20 recipients of its 2019 fellowships and awards in literary and visual arts, which are given annually to Detroit-based writers and artists working in different mediums. Each of the 18 artist fellows gets an unrestricted grant of $25,000, and the two winners of the organization’s Gilda Awards, which recognize artists early in their careers, receive $5,000 to support their practice.