- It is Black History Month, and the Carr Center in Detroit is celebrating Black arts through February.

An art exhibit featuring the works of Detroit students is on display at a downtown popup location.

The Carr Center in partnership with Bedrock is also hosting other activities in the space, including dance, music, poetry, film, storytelling, and quilt making.

I got all the details from the president of the Carr Center, Oliver Ragsdale.

I wanna talk about how you are celebrating Black History Month in 2024 at the Carr Center.

You've got this really interesting popup going at 1001 Woodward, which is at the corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenue, I think.

What's going on?

- It's right at the intersection.

I like to talk about it as the triangle of Campus Martius, the Compuware building, and 1001 Woodward.

We were invited to create a popup cultural center by Bedrock Detroit several months ago.

And we wanted to take advantage of the typical Carr Center program, thrust, which is a multidisciplinary way of making it all happen and bringing it all to the community.

We engaged performing artists, visual artists, film presenters, quilters, student artists, and have put it all together in a package of 29 days of incredible programming.

- What I love about this is that it is a little bit of everything, right?

It's kind of celebrating the broad spectrum of African-American cultural achievement in Detroit.

You've got a lot going on there.

- And I think it really it is the Carr Center.

The Carr Center, multidisciplinary, 365 days a year, we are doing this work, this popup gives us the opportunity to highlight it and bring it back into downtown Detroit.

We've had dance, we have the visual art exhibition that has students in it as well as professional artists.

We're having classical vocal music.

We've had jazz, we've looked at the potpourri of things, and we're even creating a community quilt that is being put together by a group of master quilters.

But we're inviting the community to come in and make their own personal patch that will all be quilted into the larger community quilt.

- Yeah, let's talk about the fact that this is happening in downtown Detroit, which I also think is significant.

Downtown is changing really rapidly.

The physical landscape of downtown looks different.

And there are lots more people down there than we've had in many years.

Lots of people who aren't from Detroit coming down and checking it out.

But putting this right at that corner, as you say, of Campus Martius and the Compuware building and 1001 Woodward really elevates the Blackness really of Detroit and says, "Look, there's lots going on here," but this is still home to the largest African-American population in the country.

And that is what defines so much of who we are in this city.

- And as you know, we've been downtown before and it's great to be back.

It's really significant as one of our previous iterations, being on Woodward is really significant.

And having those big windows and the opportunity for people to peek in and then to be drawn into being able to see the art exhibition or being drawn in while a poetry performance is going on.

I think that that's really very significant.

We've had a very diverse crowd that's come in in terms of racial background, in terms of ages, and so the location creates a magnet in and of itself.

Our permanent home in the Park Shelton is inside of a building, so it's not nearly as accessible as this space is.

So while we are doing Black art 365 days a year, this gives us an opportunity to really highlight and raise it up in such a dynamic location.

- I don't think you and I have talked much since you moved out of downtown Detroit to the Park Shelton, which is in Midtown.

Talk about what that has meant for the Carr Center and the other things that are going on that I know you guys are always kind of pushing the envelope with the cultural programming.

- I like the idea that we're pushing the envelope.

That's great.

Going into the cultural center was a very important decision on a number of levels.

Some that I didn't realize until we had done it.

But one is to put a Black arts organization in the cultural center is important in a town like Detroit.

The Charles Wright Museum has been there for 50 years, but it's a museum.

We are an arts center, a multidisciplinary arts center.

And being right across the street from the DIA and across the street from the Detroit Historical Society, that is really significant.

Being in a building that was segregated and now is thriving with a Black arts organization as a primary location in that building I think is significant.

And being able to bring people in, still having the opportunity to go to larger spaces.

It's not the biggest space, but it's a very functional space for us with the gallery and our performance studio there.

So it's really important, but it's great to be back downtown for this temporary basis and to be able to get the kind of audience response that we've been able to get.

- Yeah.

And the popup runs all the way through the month of February, isn't that right?

- Right.

It finishes on February the 29th when we culminate the event by awarding first, second, and third place prizes to the junior and senior division of students who participated in the program.

And I don't want to go without saying that it's really important to recognize Bedrock as the partner.

And them stepping up and making the huge investment that they've made to be able to make this happen, and to give it the kind of profile that it has.

We're really grateful for that support and the arts in general are better because of that investment.

- All right, well we will look forward to the rest of the month of programming and the awards for the student contributors at the end.

- And you can always check it out on thecarrcenter.org to find out all of the activities that are going on at the Carr Center.

- Well congratulations and always great to see you.

We gotta do this more often.

Thanks for being on "American Black Journal."

- Thanks so much.