MAKING A TROUBLESOME AND BEAUTIFUL HOME:
EVIDENCE, ARTIFACTS, HEIRLOOMS
with Tony Whitfield
On View Sept. 11 - Oct. 3
Opening Event September 11, 2026
5-7pm
1501 Parkview St.
Beauty is like an antidote to the trouble, but also born as a result of it. Just generally thinking about the different ways that you look at trouble — it really is the result of being born in this world. You inherit both trouble and a desire to solve it, which is often a beautiful pursuit.
— TWMAKING A TROUBLESOME AND BEAUTIFUL HOME: EVIDENCE, ARTIFACTS, HEIRLOOMS is a project of 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow Tony Whitfield and a group of his lifelong, as well as recent, creative partners in what has become Whitfield CoLabs. Encompassing furniture and accessory design, photography, and poetic autobiography in circuitous recollections of a period of private and public evolution as a member of groundbreaking creative communities in New York and Detroit, this exhibition is an examination of that experience drawing upon the ways in Whitfield’s understanding of his life has come to occupy material culture as evidence, artifacts, and heirlooms.
“As the talented child of a talented and beautiful woman who was told that there were no successful Black women artists and that she should become a cosmetologist, I was encouraged to pursue the breadth of my creative impulses. By 1976, when I won that year’s Academy of American Poets award for undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence, I had begun working on two tracks that were sometimes parallel, sometimes alternating, and sometimes intersecting. One path as maker of art, design and craft, and the other as a writer who understood that as a queer, Black man who lived ongoing, and often urgent needs to verbally articulate my understanding of the world, the path forward would be as critical, complex, and layered as my need to breathe.”
— TWBorn in Philadelphia in 1954, Tony Whitfield relocated to Detroit in August 2020 where he developed projects in response to the LGBTQ community’s experience of AIDS/HIV and COVID-19. In 2022-23 he art directed two large scale mural projects for the Ruth Ellis Center and displayed his work in five venues of Might Real/Queer Detroit. In 2023, Whitfield became a Kresge Artist Fellow and used funds from that award to support the development of designs and organizational plans for a reimagined version of Detroit’s vacant landmark Alger Theater. During this period he was also an online curator and facilitator for Village. Berlin’s STRETCH Festivals. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College, City College and The New School for Social Research. His work for theater has been shown by La MaMa, ETC. As a visual artist, his solo exhibitions have been presented at Wasserman Projects in Detroit, HOWL! Happening in NYC, the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Centre LGBTQ and NUIT BLANCHE 2017 in Paris, in group exhibitions in galleries and museums including NYC’s MoMA, Museum of Art and Design, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Leslie Lohman Museum and Dieu Donné Papermill. An Emeritus Professor at Parsons School of Design since 2020, Whitfield began teaching as an adjunct instructor and in 1993, joined the full-time faculty in 1996 and assumed various leadership roles including Chair of the Product Design Department and Associate Dean for Civic Engagement. He has also been a Teaching Fellow at Cranbrook Art Academy and NYC’s School of Visual Arts Whitfield was also an influential member of public and non-profit sectors in NYC’s arts community from 1976 serving as Senior Policy Analyst for Cultural Affairs in the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, Associate Director of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Performance Curator at Just Above Midtown, and Director of Printed Matter, Inc. In 2023 he received a Kresge Artist Fellowship and was among the first Creators of Culture Award recipients from Culture Source in Detroit. Whitfield has also been a Fellowship recipient of the Camargo Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, La MaMa ETC in Umbria, a Yale University/Stoeckel Fellow a NYC Mayor’s Fellowship and multiple years of project support from The New School.