The Detroit Design Festival isn't just about providing a venue for the city's creative class to show off its art works. It's also about providing more opportunity, capital specifically, for the creatively inclined start-ups and entrepreneurs.
The New Center-based festival is Detroit's first-ever crowd-sourced design event. The Festival is providing mini-grants from a variety of local sources that will fund 77 design happenings between Sept. 21 and Sept. 28. It's one more piece of the money puzzle to make sure the city's rich creative class is properly compensated for their innovative work.
"It's pretty obvious that crowd-source funding is becoming a movement in Detroit," says Matt Clayson, director of the
Detroit Creative Corridor Center, which is organizing the
Detroit Design Festival. "We're doing some really unique things here."
A variety of major institutions and businesses have come together in recent years to provide a significant amount of new capital for the city's creative class through a combination of crowd funding, grants and commissions. For instance, Quicken Loans is sponsoring the Detroit Design Festival and commissioned a number of local graffiti artists to provide art in its new offices in the Compuware Building in downtown Detroit.
ArtPlace is investing more than $1 million to use art as a center piece for economic development along Woodward Avenue in downtown and Midtown. The Kresge Foundation has also provided a number of art fellowships to local artists worth $25,000 in recent years. It all adds up to a sizeable chunk of change that is being invested in Detroit's vibrant creative economy.
"I look at a lot of this activity as market acceleration activity," Clayson says. "We have all of the assets for a robust creative economy in Detroit.
Source: Matt Clayson, director of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at
SEMichiganStartup.com.
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