Hanging out at Detroit's Red Bull House of Art

Detroit has become a legitimate destination for artists priced out of New York and Los Angeles. Cheap rent, vacant historic architecture, and a cityscape that feels like a surreal postcard from another era — unmarred by the glass-tower developments invading cities coast to coast — have drawn a wave of transplants. New galleries and arts organizations are multiplying downtown and in the Eastern Market District, including a distinctive program run by Red Bull House of Art.

Housed in the cavernous barrel rooms of a former brewery, Red Bull House of Art combines a sprawling exhibition space with a live-in residency program for emerging and mid-career artists. Director Matt Eaton ran the program for four years focused exclusively on Detroit artists, hosting over 100 in exhibitions and programming. The program has since expanded nationally: each cycle selects three artists from across the country, provides them with live-work space, a supply budget, and a living stipend over three months. Artists create new work freely — no rent pressure, no distractions of home life — with a show at Red Bull House of Art as the culmination. Red Bull facilitates sales but takes no commission, and artists leave with everything they made. The trade-off is community investment: the company hosts locals for exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, and educational programming.

The residency’s second cycle closed with an exhibition by Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, and Ian Kuali’I — three artists whose work approaches portraiture from entirely different directions.

Michael Reeder’s paintings fuse old and new: detailed portraits layered against graphic backgrounds, with echoes of George Grosz and Giorgio de Chirico, unified by bold color.

Drew Merritt works from the tradition of historic oil painting — soft, photorealistic figures pulled from the language of portraiture, often unsettlingly emotional. For Red Bull House of Art, Merritt painted site-specific murals: haunting figures from an indefinable time, floating across the walls.

Ian Kuali’I combines abstract painting with meticulous paper cutting, using negative space to build bold portraits. The residency gave him the time and scale to create his largest paper-cut portrait to date — ten feet tall. The thematic cohesion across three distinct practices made for a show that held together despite, or because of, those differences.

The following cycle featured Lala Abaddon, Coby Kennedy, and Beau Stanton, with an exhibition scheduled for November.