By 1901 they had opened their first studio in the carriage house of the Ransom Gillis House in Brush Park, naming their enterprise Pewabic after a copper mine near Mary’s hometown. They developed the iridescent glazes that made Pewabic famous, which caught and refracted light like oil on water. Pewabic tiles spread across the city and beyond, to schools, churches, and train stations, and as far as the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., each one a convincing argument for the vitality of ornament.

Now operating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Pewabic continues its founding mission “to enrich the human spirit through clay.” In the gift shop, I buy my partner’s mother, a long-time Michigander, a small green ornament impressed with the outline of the state, encircled by the phrase “Michigan: Enjoy the Beauty and the Bounty.” It’s a modest object imbued with the conviction of an organization that still believes art can make ordinary life more beautiful.

Before moving into the art world, The Shepherd founders Anthony and JJ Curis built their careers around real-estate and finance: Anthony worked at Curis Enterprises, a family-run Detroit real-estate firm active in downtown acquisitions, while JJ worked as an accountant. In 2012 they founded Library Street Collective, merging art and urban regeneration with a gallery that evolved into a civic-minded project producing large-scale public works and neighborhood collaborations across Detroit. In 2019 the couple purchased the former Good Shepherd Catholic Church and transformed its 3.5-acre site into The Shepherd, an arts campus guided by their mission to “utilize the arts to create positive and equitable change in our community.” Working with the city’s Arts, Culture, and Entrepreneurship Office and neighborhood groups such as Jefferson East Inc., the Curises have positioned The Shepherd as both cultural destination and civic anchor. The adaptive reuse design by Peterson Rich Office, the Brooklyn-based firm known for its thoughtful approach to public space, reshapes an institution that once built community around religion into one that now builds community around the arts through the insertion of two gallery volumes that leave the church’s original shell unaltered.

Beyond the main gallery, the campus, designs by Office of Strategy + Design (OSD), includes ALEO, a former rectory turned art-driven bed-and-breakfast and artist residency; the Charles McGee Legacy Park, a sculpture garden honoring the beloved Detroit artist; and It Takes a Village Skatepark, designed with legendary pro-skateboarder Tony Hawk and artist McArthur Binion. Together, these elements make The Shepherd something both reverent and new.

Cyndia Robinson’s nails are small topographies: pale violet, almond-shaped, encrusted with shiny spheres that catch the light like dew on chrome. Alive and almost organic, they shimmer with both polish and intention. In her hands, adornment becomes an assertion of culture, authorship, and belonging.

Opened this summer in Detroit’s Sugar Hill Arts District, Cure Nailhouse reimagines the familiar nail salon as a social experiment rooted in self-care. A Detroit native and lifelong advocate for access and artistry in beauty, Robinson conceived her first entrepreneurial venture as a hybrid between neighborhood salon and cultural hub, structuring it like an art gallery with rotating exhibitions, artist residencies, and open-studio nights where customers turn into collaborators. At Cure, artists create, mentor, and exhibit alongside ceramics by local artisans and paintings by Detroit artists, expanding the social ecosystem of the salon into a full expression of community, creativity, and care.

To realize her vision, Robinson enlisted Tiffany Thompson, founder of Duett Interiors, the Portland-based studio known for its material sensitivity. The name “Duett” captures Thompson’s philosophy: design as dialogue, a duet between client and designer, and trust and intuition. “We wanted refinement with audacity,” Thompson says of her work at Cure. “That doesn’t mean excess. It means every detail matters.” From the street, Cure’s glass façade gives little away. Inside, mauve-plastered walls absorb the light while a long metal bar and inflated Plopp stools by Oskar Zięta reflect it. By morning it serves coffee; by night, champagne.

Even the treatment menu becomes a conceptual proposition. Manicures and gels are termed 2D, 3D, and ephemeral sculpture, a taxonomy that reframes nail work as fine art. I mention that her strategy recalls the entrepreneurial precision of early Starbucks: how a dated, overlooked industry can be reimagined through language and design, shifting perception from service to culture. Robinson smiles and nods, calling it “a new language for beauty.” Cure affirms what many women have always known: beauty is infrastructure. “I wanted to create a space that honors the women who built this culture but were rarely credited for it,” Robinson says. “Black women shaped what beauty looks like in America; this is a place that finally reflects that.”

The tale captures Cranbrook’s spirit at its most generative: artists and architects cross-pollinating, dissolving hierarchies, and redefining collaboration. And as promised, the show introduces many overlooked figures such as Charles Harrison, a Black industrial designer whose career spanned more than 750 objects, including the ubiquitous pop phenomenon, the View-Master Model G (1958). Harrison later became Sears, Roebuck and Company’s first Black executive. Equally revealing is Edward Wormley, who shared both a home and a studio with designer Edward C. Crouse; together they shaped the 1957 Janus line for Dunbar, a fusion of domestic comfort and Modernist rigor.

As we leave, we run into Leon Ransmeier, a designer and longtime friend and collaborator to both PIN–UP and MillerKnoll. He’s wearing an Ed Ruscha baseball cap that reads BOSS, a wry, possibly accidental nod to his new role. He leads me through his new domain: a suite of serene, empty studios, spaces soon to be reanimated by the next generation of designers. As we walk, he reflects on what lies ahead. “The program I lead was renamed Industrial Design prior to my arrival, a change I welcome,” he says. “The challenge is defining what that means today. I prefer to emphasize a discipline based on collaboration rather than merely thinking about ‘product’ and serial production. It’s about doing things we can’t accomplish as individuals.”

From the street, the Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum looks less built than encrusted, its walls flashing back the city’s light in shards of mirror and clay. For years I’d only seen the place in passing, framed by a car window. On this bright morning, I finally stop. Waiting out front are two Associate Curators from the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Abel González and Isabella Nimmo are flushed with excitement. They speak reverently about Olayami Dabls’s forthcoming retrospective. After years of renovation, the Detroit icon’s institutional debut, will reopen the museum this spring marking its 20th anniversary. An elegant Black man joins us. They continue, their admiration so complete that they forget to introduce the newcomer. For a moment I wonder who he is.

The mystery resolves when he turns toward me and says, “Lean in.” His voice is low and deliberate. I do as he says. Dabls begins walking, and we follow him through the sculpture park: mirrored totems, rusted metal, clay figures, and decommissioned cars transformed into art. We stop at an out-of-commission 1980s Craftsman tractor surrounded by a loose circle of old metal chairs. The seats are occupied by slabs of concrete embossed with the outlines of heads, each with hair in dreadlocks. “This one’s called Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust,” Dabls says, explaining that in African cosmology, iron and rock are spiritual opposites: one changes, the other endures. “It’s a lesson,” he says. “Even the strongest things can learn from time.”

After touring us through each piece, we arrive at the second building that bookends the property. One of Detroit’s old two-story wooden homes, the structure’s siding has been swallowed by layers of paint, glass, bottle caps, and broken tile. On one side, a two-story fish ripples in mosaicked scales; on the other, a striped peacock stands elegantly, feathers at half-mast. Dabls calls the decommissioned home a “decorative vessel.” Each vessel, he explains, is composed of four elements: iron, rock, wood, and mirror, and can be asked to do three things. “I asked that vessel to keep the vandals away, to keep the graffiti off, and to keep the city from seeing it.” The request is practical, although its logic is spiritual: decoration as protection.

At that point, Dabls drops a curveball, pulling us out of the magic of his creations: billionaire developer Dan Gilbert offered to restore this vessel and “transform it into an Airbnb,” he says. An outsider artist who built his own world on the city’s margins is now courted by the very systems he once stood apart from. Dabls embraces both museum and developer as collaborators in the circulation of his ideas; the latter partnership embodies the paradoxes that build today’s Detroit.

Before leaving, we step inside the museum to buy beads, a small token of this encounter to carry home. From thousands of options, I choose a bundle of Howlite skull beads, brightly hued in red, yellow, green, and violet. Dabls himself rings me up, threading the skulls onto a length of yellow cord. The exchange feels like an extension of everything we learned outside: his belief that for him art, labor, and even commerce can be equal forms of communication.