Ever Emerging: An artist conversation about practice, process & progres

EVER EMERGING: An Artist Conversation about Practice, Process, and Progression
Friday, December 5 | 6:00 – 8:30 PM
Cass Corridor Commons (4605 Cass Ave)

Hosted by Dr. Chanel Beebe & Bryce Detroit

Event Description

Join Detroit artists Dr. Chanel Beebe and Bryce Detroit for an intimate, truth-telling conversation on what it really means to build, sustain, and evolve a creative practice over a decade.

Both artists recently installed new works—Mitosis Abstracted (Beebe) and Grow Children (Detroit)—as the inaugural pieces of a new permanent collection at Cass Corridor Commons, home to generations of radical organizing, abolitionist thought, creative resistance, and community care. This event marks the first public conversation in a long-term collaborative curatorial initiative between Chanel, Bryce, and Paul to grow a living gallery of Detroit-based artists whose work centers movement, healing, and collective imagination.

Set inside a venue with nearly 200 years of history in liberation work, EVER EMERGING invites participants into the raw, unpolished, non-performative side of artistry and entrepreneurship—the “soil work” beneath the exhibitions, accolades, and public narratives.

Through dialogue rooted in honesty, humor, vulnerability, and community wisdom, Chanel and Bryce will explore:

🌱 The lifelong cycle of emergence
How artists can be “established” in one lane and “brand new” in another—and why emergence is not a phase, but a rhythm.

🧱 Foundation-building, failing forward, and starting again
The unsexy, necessary layers of creative infrastructure—resource gaps, pivots, ego death, rebirth, and learning in real time.

🌿 Making art through transition
What it means to create while something is dying, something else is being born, and neither is fully clear yet.

👁️ Art as memory, mirror, and medicine
How their pieces, Mitosis Abstracted and Grow Children, reflect cycles of growth, identity, unlearning, and collective care.

🧩 The power of collaboration in Detroit’s cultural ecosystem
How shared practice, shared story, and shared labor can become a form of community wealth and cultural continuity.

About the Artists

Dr. Chanel Beebe is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator, and founder of Beebe Arts LLC. Her work blends abstraction, symbolism, storytelling, and systems thinking to explore identity, memory, power, and liberation. Chanel’s practice spans painting, photography, design, and participatory research rooted in Black community wisdom, creative inquiry, and care-based design. Her work lives in galleries, classrooms, community spaces, and publications across the country.

Bryce Detroit is a multimodal Afrofuturist griot, artist, activist, and pioneer of Entertainment Justice. His work uses music, sociocultural iconography, and ancestral legacies to preserve and produce new Diasporic Afrikan narratives. As a nationally recognized cultural strategist—featured by Harvard University, New Museum’s Ideas City, UNESCO’s City of Design, and Race Forward—Bryce creates infrastructures for intersectional, self-determined communities. His ROAD WORK™ series reframes street signage as cultural literacy and liberation technology.

About the Venue

Cass Corridor Commons, managed by the East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), is a historic home for Detroit’s social justice movements. Since the 1800s, the building has been a hub for abolitionists, draft resisters, environmental justice advocates, youth organizers, radical educators, musicians, and visionaries committed to community self-determination.

Today, it remains a multigenerational sanctuary for movement builders. This conversation honors that legacy while planting seeds for a new era of collaborative arts curation within The Commons.

What to Expect

✨ A grounding welcome and introduction
✨ Artist-to-artist conversation between Chanel and Bryce
✨ Reflections on their newly installed works
✨ Space for community engagement and questions
✨ Light refreshments + time to connect

This is not a panel. Not a performance. Not a polished highlight reel.

It is an honest conversation between two Detroit creatives about the real cost, real beauty, and real becoming behind the work—an invitation to witness artists mid-process, mid-transition, and ever-emerging.