COMPOSING DETROIT
ROLES: Art Direction / Branding / Co-Founder / Curator / Marketing
What started as a small group of photographers coming together during a pandemic quickly turned into a ambitious community wanting to create something more in and for their city. Within a year Gerard reached out and pulled together many talented artists in the Detroit area, and shortly after that Composing Detroit was established.
Nonprofit and Exhibition Showcase
I first met Gerard randomly through connecting on Instagram. We were both snapping similar subjects and ideas, and decided to meet up and wander the city together. Soon after that he had already started building a great group of other talented street photographers, and reached out to myself, Jordan, and Olena to start an exhibition show to connect and feature all of these talented creatives living in the area. After many coffees at the Dessert Oasis, we established the name for our show and non-profit, Composing Detroit.
Fall 2022 Exhibition Showcase
The Fall 2022 Exhibition was our most recent and experimental showcase, and our Third official one we have curated so far. We switched it up compared to the other two by cutting back the featured artists by half, and allowing many other up-and-coming creatives to share 1-2 featured works that they submitted.
Foundation Hotel Partnership
With the success of our first two shows we have had, new opportunities and connections had begun happening for Composing Detroit. The Foundation Hotel reached out to us shortly after the success of our April show, and we began a partnership with them where a handful of our artists now have their work featured on the 3rd floor of their hotel. Below are a few promotional material I had designed to promote and celebrate the event. We will have work on display there until early 2023.
April 2022 Exhibition Showcase
We had our first successful show for the non-profit, located at The Riverside in Detroit, back in September 2021. Through that experience we had already began learning a lot about what goes into curating and planning something this big (like needing food, bathrooms, security, etc). We also learned that somehow even though it was a showcase featuring 15+ photographers, not a single one of us managed to take pictures capturing the event. It helped us prepare a lot more for our next show that we held in April 2022.
To help give more credibility of making this an event we wanted people to be excited about, we began developing more of an identity. I took inspiration from some of the posters and branding I had done for concerts before covid, and created a colorful series of Detroit inspired artwork to promote out show and group, and to promote our artists we were showcasing to stand out nicely in the social media environments we were advertising this all in. To our pleasure, it was a huge hit and we managed to have 500+ people come out that night!
