Detroit’s burgeoning Little Village arts district expands to the riverfront with first Stanton Yards show

By Lee DeVito

Sep 6, 2024 at 9:33 am

In an old boathouse on Detroit’s east side, I.M. Weiss Gallery director Isabelle Weiss is putting the finishing touches on her latest show. Titled Until… and opening on Friday, the exhibition features 2023 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow Lauren Kalman, who has presented otherwise meticulous black ceramic pottery intentionally warped with dents, handprints, and other imperfections. The works are displayed on small tables under track lighting in the middle of the boathouse, with some clustered together, as if fitting together like a puzzle.

“Until about two weeks ago, there was a boat in here,” Weiss says. “It was an actively used shop building.”

The show is the first to be held as part of an ambitious new project dubbed Stanton Yards, which aims to open about 13 acres in a marina space along the Detroit River to the public. The project is an extension of what is known as Little Village, a sprawling arts district across Jefferson Avenue in the East Village neighborhood that includes the church-turned-gallery The Shepherd, the Charles McGee Legacy Park, a skate park designed by pro skater Tony Hawk, and more. Additional businesses set to move into the area in the coming months include the Louis Buhl & Co. gallery, the Coup D’état retail store, a cocktail bar called Father Forgive Me, and others, and existing arts-related businesses in the area include Pewabic Pottery, one of the oldest continuously operating potteries in the U.S.

Little Village is the brainchild of Anthony and JJ Curis, the art-aficionado couple behind downtown Detroit’s Library Street Collective gallery and its adjacent Belt alleyway.

“To be honest, we didn’t even really know that it was a marina across the street from us,” Anthony Curis says. “The buildings up on Jefferson are so buttoned up, there’s no visibility to the water.”

The plan is to redevelop a group of buildings, which includes an old theater, an old Navy facility, and a boat showroom — “taking 80,000 square feet of buildings that have been historically over the last 30 to 40 years for boat storage and service and transforming and transitioning them for more cultural and community-type uses,” Curis says.

That includes scaling down the size of the buildings to their original footprints, which will open up more space for pedestrians. “As soon as you get behind those first couple of buildings up on Jefferson, then you’ll walk into this beautiful green space,” Curis explains.

The boathouse where Weiss’s show is on display is still pretty raw. Curis says they are still working on designs and plans for the cluster of buildings, and expects to officially start construction next year.

“In many ways, this is the first show that will happen at Stanton Yards,” he says of Weiss’s exhibition. “And hopefully, it kind of gives people an indication of where our heads are at, and where this is going.”

Isabelle Weiss in the private showroom in her home in Little Village, Detroit, surrounded by work from artists and designers connected to Detroit.

Across the street in Little Village is the latest version of the I.M. Weiss Gallery, the exhibition space Weiss founded a decade ago as Next:Space. The gallery was previously located in a former mechanic shop under Weiss’s Milwaukee Junction loft, but here in East Village, Weiss has consolidated: it’s now a largely appointment-only showroom inside her home.

She admits blending her personal and professional spaces took some getting used to, but in the end she believes it made sense for her business.

“A couple weeks before my grand opening event [in April] I was like, ‘Oh God, what am I thinking?’” she says. But it seems to be working out so far. “I think for me, the work is personal to me,” she adds. “And I feel like the fact that I have made this so much a part of my life is something that I want to share with people.”

While staging artists’ work in her living room can be a challenge — Weiss has less space to work with than a typical white box gallery, and has to work within the confines of the space, which includes a bay window — it has its upsides. For one, prospective buyers can see the art in the context of a domestic space. “It has to be so extra intentional when you’re doing it in your house,” Weiss says of presenting work there.

Her next show at her home gallery is titled Adaptive Objects / or / Terms for Living by the ceramicist Benjamin Teague, which opens on Friday the 13th. The exhibition will be presented as three “acts” rotated out every two weeks.

“I’m thinking a lot about theater and plays, and how objects are these characters in our lives,” Weiss says. The show displays the objects, organic shapes with a weathered look, on actual furniture from Teague’s studio. The first act focuses on objects that are between five and ten years old, while the final act will bring in more recent works — which are actually older works that Teague has essentially remixed, highlighting the passage of time.

Weiss says there are plans to host district-wide art events and gallery crawls in the future in Little Village, which she will also participate in.

“It’s always been one of the challenges with the city, because it is such a massive place in terms of square miles, of being able to bring some of these like-minded things together,” Curis says. “There’s a huge benefit for all of the different pieces of the puzzle in terms of being able to kind of collaborate in different synergies.”

He adds, “The Little Village, the concept behind it isn’t really necessarily about geographical boundaries. It’s really more about ideas and kind of bringing some of these cultural people and places together. We see Stanton Yards as an extension of it.”

Until... opens at 6 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 6 at Stanton Yards; 9666 E. Jefferson Ave., Detroit. The show is open to the public from noon-5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Oct. 5 or by appointment.