The Michigan Central x Newlab Creative Residency launches its inaugural cohort this fall. Six artists. $30,000 each. Six months of studio space at Newlab Detroit and access to Newlab's fabrication shop.
The Knight Foundation is funding it. Cézanne Charles and John Marshall, who run rootoftwo, are administering it. Kelly Kivland, Michigan Central Art's curatorial director, is the curator of record.
The 2024 fellows are Simon Anton, Ash Arder, Leith Campbell, Michael Candy, Kristina Sheufelt, and Wes Taylor. The mandate is broad: art-meets-technology projects that benefit from being made inside an active innovation campus. Newlab Detroit has been on the Michigan Central campus in Corktown since April 2023, in the renovated Book Depository building, with more than 100 startups in residence working on mobility, climate tech, robotics, and adjacent areas.
Putting six artists in the middle of all of that is the whole idea. The program emphasizes emerging and mid-career artists based in metro Detroit. Stipends are unrestricted.
Newlab membership comes with the residency. So does mentorship from researchers and entrepreneurs working in the building. The artists also get a public-facing platform: panel conversations, exhibitions, and presentations are part of the deliverable.
Kivland and rootoftwo built the residency on the framework Michigan Central established in 2021 with the larger Michigan Central Art Program. Bagley Mobility Hub, which opened in spring 2023, was the first major art commission. Patrick Ethen's neon installation in the southern stairwell.
Senghor Reid's water-cistern paintings. The residency extends that line of work past one-time commissions into something more sustained. Cam Lawrence, Newlab's CEO, has framed the program as part of Newlab's longer-running practice of putting artists into the same room as the technologists.
The startups benefit from cultural pressure on their assumptions. The artists benefit from the fabrication labs and the access. Both are betting Detroit is the place to do this.
The first fellows started work in September. A 2025 cohort follows. A 2026 expansion adds an Art and Health track in partnership with Henry Ford Health.
The inaugural Interface exhibition is scheduled for April 9, 2026.
2050 15th Street, Newlab Detroit at Michigan Central, Corktown.
