Good Friday afternoon everyone:

If you didn’t know poet-essayist-biographer-scholar-distinguished professor-and-more Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd and picked up Thursday’s Detroit Free Press, you and thousands of other readers like yourself found out. There she was, on the front of the entertainment section taking up almost the entire 21”x12” page.

Boyd is our 2023 Kresge Eminent Artist, the 15th metro Detroit artist we have honored for a lifetime of achievement in their chosen art forms and their contributions to the cultural communities of the region. For those who are new to the Foundation, the designation comes with a $50,000 no-strings-attached purse plus the creation of a short film released online and a monograph; several thousand copies of the latter are distributed at no cost, and the digital version remains available for download in perpetuity.

And every year we hope it comes with the kind of exposure that Melba seems set to receive. In addition to the substantial article in the Free Press, there were shorter ones in Detroit News, Metro Times and DBusiness. The University of Michigan alumni magazine, Michigan Alum, has told us that they plan a piece, and we’re doing additional local and national outreach. We’ll keep you abreast through Kresge’s social media channels as more comes in.

Meanwhile, along with our partners at Kresge Arts in Detroit — the folks at the College for Creative Studies who manage the Eminent Artist selection and administration for us — we are elevating Melba on our own channels. If you read just one of these pieces, try the one by Nichole Christian at Kresge.org.

Nichole has been the creative director and editor for the last four of our Eminent Artist monographs. On her fifth, with Melba, she is again researching and framing a singular artist whose story speaks to the interconnectedness of artists and other cultural workers in our community, and the larger history of metro Detroit. Melba’s is, as she told Nichole, “absolutely a Detroit story.” That story includes parents in the Great Migration, the literary influence of Motown, and ties to Black Detroit’s poet-publisher titans Dudley Randall and Naomi Long Madgett, both of them Detroit Poet Laureates, and Naomi also a Kresge Eminent Artist. The story also includes a connection — by circumstance rather than choice — to one of the most tumultuous chapters of Detroit’s late 20th century history. And it’s a story in good hands with Nichole and our new monograph art director, Ed Ryan, plus Jennifer, Alejandro, Julie, and Kim, who work closely with them.

More than 20 years ago, Melba co-edited an anthology of Detroit poets, Abandoned Automobile. Her preface spoke passionately about Detroit poetry, but if you substitute art for poetry, her words speak to why we do what we do in the arts – why we believe a robust arts and culture ecosystem is so fundamental to life in Detroit, and by extension, any American city:

These poets listen to the hum of history and the clash of metal. They reveal life still striving in the refuge civilization forgets, but never forgives. They meld poems from the rust of abandoned automobiles, detecting the molecules of disfigured flesh grasping at hidden shadows for promises, reconfiguring the triangles of shattered glass, freezing the mirror staring back at them. They write under the shade of weathered trees, bathe their words in a river that withstands the undertow of the Great Lakes, and with each new poem rebuild meaning for the city.

We are privileged to be able to recognize such inspirational, powerful contributions to our community’s artistic culture, its history, and its aspirations.

Rip

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