2024 Renegade Craft Tour! →

Renegade Craft Fair

September 5, 2019

Building a Playground in Detroit

There’s a lot of beautiful, avant-garde art being made in Motor City, and Playground Detroit is where to find it.

Dreamy installations, community events, the launching and championing of now internationally renowned artists’ careers…the gallery-meets-creative agency has bolstered Detroit’s creative economy in a real way. So of course we crushed on Playground from afar, dreaming of a day when we could collaborate.

When we decided to bring Renegade to Detroit, we reached out to Playground, crossed our fingers, tapped our heels, and held our breath – and it worked! For our first collaboration, we worked together to bring Thing Thing’s Rainbro to our marketplace, where guests interacted with the piece while shopping. It was a centerpiece of the Fair, and one of our favorite installations to date.

For this year’s Renegade Detroit in Eastern Market, we collaborated again with Playground to bring an installation by Detroit-based artist Javier Prieto to the Fair. Asymmetric Affects explores the relationship between environment and subject, using art to facilitate a conversation between the two.

“The installation is an ode to the ancient greek tradition of finding divine and beyond comprehensible qualities in matter.” – Prieto

Read our full interview with (the clever, funny, and brilliant) Prieto here, and see the installation at Renegade Detroit in Eastern Market on Sept. 14 + 15.

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We are so, so grateful to our friends at Playground for being the best collaborators – the way this community has rallied behind Renegade Detroit is truly so special. For more information on Playground’s events, exhibitions, artists, and more, head here.

We’re always on the lookout for collaborations like Playground and commissions from artists like Javier Prieto and Thing Thing – if you have any ideas, we’re all ears!