Concert of Colors ran for the 33rd time from July 16 to 21, 2024, with most stages at the Detroit Institute of Arts and additional programming across the Detroit Historical Museum, the Charles H. Wright Museum, the Arab American National Museum, the Hellenic Museum of Michigan, the Michigan Science Center, and Spot Lite. Free admission.
Six days of programming. The 2024 theme: Peace, Love, and Understanding. Don Was named the theme.
Was, the producer who has been a Detroit fixture for decades, was on the lineup twice. His Detroit All Star Revue closed Sunday night at the DIA's Detroit Film Theatre. He also organized a tribute to the MC5 with Ann Delisi, Peter Werbe, Leni Sinclair, and Tino Gross at the Detroit Historical Museum.
"Considering the chaos of the world today," Was said in a press release, "we need to laser in on that, so it was unanimous to choose the theme of Peace, Love and Understanding." The genre map across the week was the festival's standard: Caribbean reggae, soca, zouk, dancehall (Universal Xpression on the DIA's North Stage Saturday). British funk and rock at the DFT. Inuit.
K-pop. Mexican. Appalachian.
Chinese cultural costumed dance and drumming. Afro-Cuban. Zimbabwean.
Salsa fusion at the Detroit Historical Museum. A collaboration between Detroit's all-women jazz group Straight Ahead and Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. Trans Global Underground (described by founder Ismael Ahmed as "essentially the world music techno group for Europe").
The Forum on Community, Culture and Race, the festival's annual conversation series with artists, organizers, and community leaders, ran in parallel.
Ahmed founded Concert of Colors in 1993 as a one-day event at Chene Park, drawing a modest crowd. By 1999, attendance was around 10,000.
In 2001, the festival went to three days as part of Detroit's tricentennial, drawing 100,000. It expanded to nine days in 2019. The festival is one of the few free festivals at this scale anywhere in the country.
Ahmed has been clear about why. He has said the events are free even though the festival struggles every single year, because low-income people have as much right to the culture as anyone does and money shouldn't be a barrier.
After 33 years, Concert of Colors has held that line with no admission fee.
Location: Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue, and surrounding cultural-center venues
