At Whose Expense is a billboard exhibition organized by Eradajere Oleita and Ellen Rutt in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. “At Whose Expense?” is a question directed towards corporations, developers, and the government agencies demanding accountability, change and healing for the years of harm inflicted on historically marginalized communities. Climate justice IS social justice.
Increased lead levels, unregulated air pollution, frequent water shut-offs, housing foreclosures and food insecurity disproportionately affect the Black and Brown communities that makeup 80% of Detroit's population. Because Detroit is at the center of many intersecting issues, the billboard exhibition is an opportunity to illustrate concerns, needs, and dreams in a highly visible public platform and boldly assert that these egregious crimes will not be tolerated.
“We keep using big words to explain a visual problem, if it’s happening SHOW them!” says Eradajere Oleita, one of the curators of this project. “Now is the time for artists of all kinds from every community to come together and bring their light out into the streets.”
The At Whose Expense selected artists are Loralee Grace, Bryce Detroit, Liz Kennedy, Nori Whisenand, Kristin Alexis Shaw, and Rosa Maria Zamarrón.
Curated by Eradajere Oleita, Ellen Rutt, Bryan Lewis (executive director of Ecoworks Detroit) and Chanel Beebe (art curator and CEO of BITTEN magazine).
During the week of June 7, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each selected work on billboard ad spaces in Detroit, MI. The public art will be on view for at least one month.
All artists are on view at all 5 locations on the map below.
Participating Organizations
Billboard by Ellen Rutt
Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.
The Chip Bag Project - Collecting used chip bags and creating sustainably made sleeping bags for the homeless.
Connect with Chip Bag Project on Instagram at @chipbagproject.
EcoWorks is a Detroit based nonprofit with over thirty years of providing services at the intersection of community development and sustainability. While our roots are firmly planted in energy conservation, we have grown to emphasize all aspects of sustainable development as it relates to building affordable, energy efficient residential housing and commercial buildings.
Connect with EcoWorks on Instagram at @ecoworksdetroit.
Bitten Magazine is a quarterly print and online magazine that seeks to share important perspectives in a beautiful and eye-catching way. Bitten is published with the goal of affecting positive sustainable change in the lives of vulnerable populations. Bitten is published by Beebe Arts LLC, a social and design firm started in January 2017 focused on social and educational equity based in Detroit, Michigan.
Bitten’s Inaugural issue was released on June 19th, 2020 in honor of the 70th Celebration of Juneteenth.
Connect with Bitten Magazine on Instagram at @bittenmagazine.
Curators
Eradajere Oleita, a Nigerian born woman has made her name as a community resource. Helping people and organizations write grants, run social media, build better community strategies , transition to sustainable practices, and help brand businesses . Her work with the youth has been also as extensive from helping youth create and sell art work, become public speakers,start businesses,she also built gardens in Detroit public schools with students being the overseers of their progress and created zen rooms for students that may be deemed as problematic to give them an outlet to meditate and also express themselves in a safe environment. Along with these programs she has implemented, Eradajere also served with Ecoworks educating students about the environment from pollution to sustainability. She has helped with teaching students how to test for lead in their schools and homes and has placed air monitors in polluted areas. My favorite thing that I love is that she makes sure students are hands on which gives assistance to our future leaders to follow from. Currently is the founder of the chip bag project, a sustainable project aimed at bridging the environmental racism and social justice by using chip bags as a way to sleeping bags for the homeless.
Connect with Erada on Instagram at @erada34.
Ellen Rutt is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist and environmental justice organizer whose work surrenders to the possibilities and limitations of place in a tender call and response between control and improvisation. Through an abstract lexicon of layered shapes and primary colors, she facilitates conversations between materiality and movement, between place and process. As an organizer, she wields the tools of visual communication to amplify marginalized voices, collaborate with new and existing environmental justice initiatives and build a future that prioritizes race and class equity and multispecies flourishing.
Rutt graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art Grand Rapids, the East Hawaii Center for Contemporary Art and has completed murals and installations in locations around the world including France, New York, Canada, and Hawaii, among others.
Connect with Ellen on Instagram at @ellenrutt.
Bryan Lewis has been named the next Executive Director of the environmental non-profit. Most recently the Program Director of EcoWorks’ Youth Energy Squad, Lewis will bring his imaginative and justice-oriented approach to EcoWorks as the organization continues to support Detroit residents, institutions, and neighborhoods in achieving environmental sustainability.
“As a young black Detroiter who’s devoted his career to building an environment that works for us all, I couldn’t be more honored to step up and lead this organization at such a critical moment in our collective history,” - Bryan Lewis
Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Chanel Beebe is a creative artist, writer, and educator who designs, implements and conducts research on S.T.E.A.M. programming. Chanel's current projects investigate how non-engineers at various S.T.E.A.M. programming sites make sense of their experience and exhibit evidence of systems thinking. Chanel has a strong passion for nourishing the critical and social consciousness of youth and is the founder and C.E.O. of a research and design firm that focuses on social and educational equity (Beebe Arts LLC). Within this role, she provides consulting, research and various forms of media design to individuals, community groups, institutions and corporations.
In 2021, Chanel will graduate with both a Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education and plans to continue to study socially situated design and learning experiences. As a growing "socio-technical activist," Chanel seeks to blend her values of equity, health and sustainability with her formal training as an Industrial Engineer. Ultimately, Chanel hopes her contributions will transform the experience of social reform and well-being for historically disenfranchised people. Creatively and professionally, Chanel seeks to use her background as an educator and engineer to create a more compassionate and sustainable relationship between people and the earth. More of Chanel's work and progress can be found at ChanelBeebe.com.
Connect with Chanel on Instagram at @chanelbb.
Selected Artists
Loralee Grace Rainy Season
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Inspired by years of exploration abroad, I make environmental and cultural paintings with oil on canvas or watercolor and gouache to create my ongoing “Futurelands” series. I paint figures wearing pollution-proof suits and air filtering contraptions, bringing awareness to these escalating environmental problems. I also bring a new approach to landscape painting by combining natural vistas with local textile motifs. Each painting I create is a celebration of vibrant cultures around the world, that shine on despite the destruction of colonial settler nations and the homogenizing forces of globalization.
Conceptually, my paintings address critical environmental issues of our time which result in devastating socioeconomic and cultural impacts.
Loralee Grace is an award winning painter who received an Honors BFA in Fine Art Painting from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2010. She has since traveled extensively, selling possessions and risking financial ruin repeatedly to inform her creative practice by traveling longterm abroad. With 4 solid years spent out of America since 2012, visiting 27 countries on 5 continents so far, she is inspired by surreal landscapes and the ancient patterns of their cultures. She has worked at her process for over a decade and finds a meditation in creating the intricate details of her artwork.
Loralee believes in sharing the beautiful aspects of the world and humanity, with nods to the deadly realities of climate change and air pollution, which often affect the poorest citizens of the globe first. A humanitarian, cultural enthusiast, and environmentalist at heart, these themes are consistently woven into her paintings.
She attended the Sowing Seeds artist residency in the remote desert town of Jaisalmer, India in 2018, won a Best in Show award from the App Gallery, was the winner of the 2016 Exit Space mural design contest for the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, and invited for 3 consecutive years to exhibit in the annual UNICEF Benefit show in Chicago. She has spoken at colleges and universities, and her work has been published in the Viator Project as well as in local magazines and newspaper articles. She has shown in galleries located from West Michigan to Wellington New Zealand, and at alternative spaces around the globe.
She moved back from a year in Melbourne Australia, to Metro Detroit, Michigan in June 2020, and is enjoying painting in her new studio in Hazel Park. She looks forward to painting murals and becoming a part of Detroits vibrant art community!
Connect with Loralee on Instagram at @Loralee_Grace_Paintings and on Facebook.
Bryce Detroit Road Work: Hood Closed to Gentrifiers
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Bryce Detroit is the multidisciplinary Afrofuturist music artist, storyteller, activist, curator, and pioneer of Entertainment Justice, demonstrating the power of music entertainment arts to preserve, produce, and promote new Diasporic Afrikan narratives, cultural literacies, and neighborhood-based economies.
Bryce Detroit is a 2020 Harvard University Council of the Arts award recipient, 2020 Transforming Power Fund awardee, 2019 New Museum Ideas Cities Fellow, 2018 Race Forward - Rinku Sen Innovation Awardee, as well as 2017 Knight Arts Challenge award winner.
Bryce Detroit grows self-determined communities as a founding member of Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition, co-founder of Detroit Community Wealth Fund, consultant at Center for Community Based Enterprises (C2BE), board member for East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), and founding member of art-activism collective Frontline Detroit.
Gentrification for me is a “traffic control” issue.
A major aspect of my multidisciplinary work is using art and design to confront the conventional [old] ways that “traffic” [people; capitalist interests] is directed into (and out of) our majority our neighborhoods. Why and how people foreign to my city/neighborhood and our native environments, enter our spaces and conduct themselves, is in fact a diplomatic affair. As a self-deputized Detroit #diplomat, one of my roles is to make the cultural code visible and explicit, and then to disseminate our cultural policies, hyper-locally to globally.
Connect with Bryce on Instagram at @brycedetroit.
Liz Kennedy ENERGY JUSTICE NOW. (*statistic is from the University of Michigan School of Public Health)
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Liz Kennedy (she/they) is an artist & environmental justice organizer based in Detroit (occupied Anishinaabe territory). She is Program Coordinator for the Detroit-based Allied Media Conference and is committed to creating spaces for artists and organizers to strategize, celebrate, and cross-pollinate across movements and mediums. They also alchemize with Lead to Life, a trans-local collective of queer artists, healers & ecologists bridging racial and environmental justice through ceremony and art practice to provoke radical imagination toward justice. Her work is to decompose systems of oppression through joy, ceremony, abolition, black feminism, and relationship with the more-than-human world.
"Energy justice" advocates for equitable participation in the energy system, while also remediating social, economic, and health burdens on those most harmed by the energy system— low-income communities of color. Nationwide, over 70% of Black people live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards (NAACP Environmental & Climate Justice Program). In Detroit, 25% of low-income households spend about 15 percent of their income on energy, which is more than four times the city median (Sierra Club). And as the billboard states, we lose hundreds of Detroiters every year because of the pollution emitted from oil and gas facilities throughout metro Detroit (the University of Michigan School of Public Health). The extractive energy economy is poisoning our communities, poisoning the planet, and exacerbating economic injustice. That's why we need energy justice now. If you'd like to support this fight in Detroit, please check out Soulardarity's Work 4 me, DTE! campaign, and support the work of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Detroiters Working For Environmental Justice, and Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision.
Connect with Liz on Instagram at @lizfkennedy.
Nori Whisenand Wait! Come Back!
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Nori Whisenand is a Northern California based architect / designer with a passion for environmental education via filmmaking, digital media and public art. Her 2010 short film for children, “V for Volunteer” explaining the plastic pollution crisis in the oceans, was featured in the SYRCL Wild and Scenic Film Festival.
Nori’s ongoing environmental media projects include concept creation & development for “Mia and the Bear” a proposed children’s TV Series highlighting endangered animals and ecosystems around the world.
While continuing an active solo practice, Nori is currently exploring the creation of large format digital image making & storytelling in the public art space.
Connect with Nori on Instagram at @napavalleyarchitect and on Twitter at @architect_good.
Kristin Alexis Shaw Climate denial is noise.
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Kristin Alexis Shaw is an award-winning marketing professional, planner, artist and author focused on storytelling and impact. In her professional capacity, she leads Communications & Public Involvement for Climate Resilience, Transportation and Infrastructure Projects and serves on the Michigan Leadership Advisory Board for the Detroit Chapter of the United States Green Building Council, and as Co-Chair of the Detroit City Council Recycling & Waste Reduction Committee. Shaw is a LEED Accredited Professional and AICP candidate, and a member of Women in Mobility Detroit, Detroit Young Professionals, and Guest Lectures at Wayne State University. Her first book, Women Driven Mobility (co-authored with Katelyn Shelby Davis) will be released in Summer of 2021.
Through writing, graphic design and photography, my work tells the story of people and the symbiotic relationship between their environment and lifestyle. As my professional work moved into the climate industry, my work began to serve as a tool, asking the viewer to reconsider their lifestyle in the spirit of conservation and humanity. Pulling from a background as an urban planner and marketer, my portfolio focuses on the micro level of human behavior and the macro of their collective impact as global citizens.
My works remind people that climate action and climate justice significantly lags in American cities compared to their global counterparts. As an author tells the story of gender inequities and how they have delayed the world’s ability to be as future-ready as needed. My academic writing covers adaptation solutions and climate readiness through human-centered design and thoughtful placemaking. Understanding that womxn and people of color are disproportionately disadvantaged and hurt by climate change, inaction is not an option. These mediums serve as venues to educate on the urgency that is protecting our home against a ticking clock that has less than a decade before it runs out.
Connect with Kristin on Instagram at @detroitkristin.
Rosa Maria Zamarrón Waawiiyaatanong Resurgance
Model Credit: Up top: Courtney Miller, Grand Traverse Band Ojibwe. Left to right: Teia McGahey, Mexican, Anishinaabe; Hadassah GreenSky, Little Traverse Bay Band Ojibwe; Joelle Joyner, Kauwetsà:ka/Cherokee
Location Pictured: N. I-75 Fwy south of Warren Ave. (east side facing north)
Rosa María Zamarrón is a Documentary Photographer from Southwest Detroit. She graduated from Grand Valley State University with a B.A in Photography, focusing primarily on Documentary/Photo-journalism. She has exhibited in various cities such as Grand Rapids, New York City, Detroit, Austin, and Rome, Italy. Her work has been in various publications including Vogue, Hour Detroit Magazine, The Detroit Free Press, Metrotimes, BridgeDetroit, D Business Magazine and WDET. Rosa María is Cofounder of La Sirena Studio, which is a collaborative female lead studio in Southwest Detroit that provides studio space in the community. Rosa María has also collaborated with local non-profits like Capture Belief and Young nation to teach photography to the youth in Southwest Detroit. She currently lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.
Connect with Rosa on Instagram at @the_zamarron.
Additional Information
-What is environmental racism?
-Water crisis: https://www.google.com/amp/s/beltmag.com/detroit-water-shutoffs-crisis-public-health-coronavirus/amp/ and https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/09/20/health/detroit-schools-water-lead-copper/index.html
-Food Apartheid: https://www.google.com/amp/s/civileats.com/2020/11/13/food-insecurity-is-rising-in-detroit-so-is-the-number-of-people-fighting-it/amp/ and https://www.thesouthend.wayne.edu/features/article_ea5c3c08-46fd-11e8-b44a-bb0dd1413b54.html
-Pollution in Southwest Detroit
This is one part of the series “Who’s that for?” With this in depth look, we wanted to bring people into the intersectionalities of social justice and using art as the main component. The Chip Bag Project was the first part. The goal of the chip bag project is to turn foil line products (Doritos bag, etc) into sleeping bags for the homeless. With this opened a lot, with the collapse of the housing market bright on a lot of predatory practices in Detroit causing the environmental catastrophe we see today.I want to show people how everything is connected! - Erada Oleita