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.

Bakpak Durden, born in Detroit, is an interdisciplinary fine artist. Durden employs a wide range of media—oil and acrylic paint, graphite, and fine art photography—to construct their hyperrealistic and conceptual works of art. Durden’s artworks illuminate the complexity and precarity of human emotion and identity by meticulously examining their own. Durden is self-taught and inspired by the baroque painting style and the language of cinema. Their artwork has been shown both nationally and internationally. They have also completed a number of murals across the nation, including one for the GUCCI VS EVERYBODY campaign.

MARS Marshall is a writer and cultural organizer born, raised, and based in Detroit. Their work intimately explores desire and longing through the lens of reclaiming the Black Trans body. Marshall is a Lambda Literary Arts Emerging Writers Fellow in poetry and a Crescendo Literary Art Poetry Incubator Fellow. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Foglifter Journal, Gertrude Press, the Shade Journal, the Lambda Literary Art anthology Emerge, and elsewhere. Marshall currently serves as the director of the Allied Media Conference.