Kresge Arts in Detroit and WDET have partnered to present a virtual artist salon series featuring the 2021 Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Awardees. This nine part series includes never before seen video presentations by awarded metro Detroit artists and writers followed by a public Q+A and conversation moderated by WDET’s Ryan Patrick Hooper.

Ijania Cortez (b. Detroit, MI 1990) is a self-taught fine artist living and working in Detroit. Her practice is centralized around painting, but also includes murals and mixed media works. She is known for her use of color and for the subjects her portraits depict—exclusively Black men from the inner city. Influenced by a modest childhood in ‘90s Detroit and her love for the residents there, her work serves to create conversations between painting and viewer. In her practice, Cortez uses neon color to note the contemporary era, showing her subjects as natural and central in environments that are unnatural, a reflection of the man-made conditions of the city. Her work interrogates beauty and vulnerability in masculinity, as well as the ability to thrive and exist despite adversity. She hosted her first solo exhibition, a Summer Nativity, in July 2017.

Detroit has been a source of inspiration for Darcel Deneau for nearly 20 years. Using glass and objects she finds around the city, she builds images of Detroit that parallel its current growth, finding that there’s a striking similarity between the approach to her process and Detroit’s transformation. Her work has been widely collected and publicly displayed. Last year, Deneau’s work was recognized as best in show at the Anton Art Center’s 2020 MI Fine Arts Competition, juried by Detroit Institute of Arts Director, Salvador Salort-Pons, and she has placed in the award category of the annual College for Creative Studies Alumni Exhibition for 3 years in a row.