Newcity Art

Visual Art Culture of Chicago and Beyond

How Artclvb Is Working To Replace Mass-Produced Decor With Real Art by Living Artists When Dorota and Steve Coy studied the relationship of today’s creatives to the cultural ecosystem, they discovered a massive gap between the traditional art market and a much larger but more humble demand among the general public.

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by K.A. Letts
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A variety of ceramic vases and pottery pieces are displayed on a table in front of a large teal artwork, showcasing different shapes, sizes, and textures.

Artist Cristina Joya at GW Home/Photo: GW Home

From the Art in Michigan guide, which appeared in Newcity’s July-August 2026 issue.

Detroit has long been one of those cities that outsiders love to underestimate right up until it produces something impossible to ignore. Cheap space, stubborn ingenuity and a deep bench of artists have made it fertile ground for creative experimentation. Because the city has never enjoyed the dense web of commercial galleries and legacy collectors that shape art scenes on the coasts, Detroit has developed another specialty: building its own infrastructure. Murals in the Market, the Heidelberg Project, the Essay’d writing program, Buffalo Prescott art studios and Hatch Hamtramck Gallery all emerged from an ingrained civic habit of making something compelling out of whatever is available. ArtClvb belongs squarely in that tradition, though with a distinctly contemporary twist, taking Detroit’s DIY attitude and giving it an app.

An entrepreneurial instinct comes naturally to Dorota and Steve Coy, the artists behind Hygienic Dress League Corp. As working artists, the duo know firsthand how much friction exists between the people making ambitious work and those who might gladly live with it if only the two parties could find each other. Their crypto-Marxist point of view—equal parts conceptual critique and enterprising idealism—has made them alert to the small absurdities and larger structural failures of the contemporary art economy.

A man and woman stand side by side indoors, near a railing, with plants and modern architecture in the background. Both look at the camera; the man wears glasses and a dark shirt, the woman a dark sweater and white pants.

Steve and Dorota Coy/Photo: Artclvb

When the Coys studied the relationship of today’s creatives to the cultural ecosystem, they discovered a massive gap between the traditional art market, serving a small group of affluent collectors, legacy estates and blue-chip artists, and a much larger but more humble demand among the general public for home and office decor. The established gallery system is moderate in size, with $60 billion in annual sales globally, while at the other end of the market (with annual sales of over $300 billion) design and home-goods retailers serve up mountains of posters and cheap reproductions at inflated prices to an uninformed public. The Coys realized that the world’s five-million working artists were stuck in the middle ground, with limited access to the gallery system, and without connection to a massive, untapped audience of interested but relatively unsophisticated art consumers.

In response to my emailed questions about the size and shape of the problem they had identified and hoped to solve, Steve Coy paints a compelling picture of the challenges for contemporary artists looking to develop relationships with new collectors: “If only half of the traditional art market is truly supporting living artists creating original artwork, the numbers suggest that maybe only one out of ten people are actually buying original art from living artists,” he writes, “while everyone else is shopping in accessible retail environments filled with factory-made reproductions, reproduced imagery, licensed graphics, mass-produced canvases, stock photography, decorative prints, algorithmically generated patterns and endlessly replicated SKUs.”

Three large, metallic chess pieces—a rook, queen, and king—sit on a chessboard on a wooden table in a modern, well-lit room with decorative items and plants in the background.

Artist Denzel Palm at GW Home/Photo: GW Home

He adds that many home-decor products are sold at the same price, or even more, than original artwork by living artists, and that in many cases, retailers use language and presentation that makes reproduced factory decor seem personal, rare or artist-made, even though the work is endlessly replicated and sold at scale.

After defining the problem, the Coys set about imagining a solution. They envisioned a digital fix augmented by in-person events—a free, app-based platform that would connect collectors with creatives, inform the tastes of a growing audience, promote artists and their work, and provide logistics and a back-office structure for selling art. Using this business model, collectors could acquire the individual artists’ works at an exhibition or online at any time. ArtClvb would offer artists real-world exhibition opportunities along with online representation and promotion of their work. Artists could support their creativity, and collectors would have an opportunity to own real, honest-to-gosh art, a win-win all around.

Justin Bailey lamps at Detroit Warehouse: Art and Design Fair/Photo: Martin Milat

The Coys enlisted the help of NewLab, a global venture platform supporting tech start-ups in Detroit for help with designing their bespoke artists’ service. ArtClvb is an offbeat pick for a nonprofit incubator platform that specializes in mobility, but NewLab’s ample resources turned out to be an ideal fit for ArtClvb’s app development needs. They secured a two-year residency in NewLab’s building in 2023-2024, where they learned the language of business: customer discovery, test marketing to reach new audiences, business strategy, how to pitch and fundraise. NewLab also connected them with legal and financial expertise to design a sturdy business plan. Their temporary workspace became a venue for programming and events, art exhibits and artist residencies. In September 2024, NewLab hosted ArtClvb’s first three-day art fair during Detroit’s Month of Design. By the end of the month, 500 artists had uploaded their artworks to the platform, 200 artists had made sales, and over two-thousand newly minted collectors had downloaded the app.

A successful launch was only the beginning of the ArtClvb project. Events, exhibitions and social media to support the online art followed. In its first two years of operation, the ArtClvb team experimented with ways to connect artists with collectors, starting with a monthly series of studio crawls across seven cities. They also began an online magazine which has featured, so far, a dozen interviews with Detroit-based artists, curators, designers and collectors, all while steadily improving the design and function of the app.

A display of four ceramic vases sits on round wooden stands, including a large dark vase with wavy handles, two brown vases with different patterns, and a pale cream pitcher. Art hangs in the background.

MadMud Ceramics at GW Home/Photo: GW Home

ArtClvb has also expanded its exhibition partnerships with retailers, a strategy that brings contemporary art into places where people might wander in intending to buy a sofa but leave contemplating ceramics. Working with retail collaborators, the organization has mounted multiple pop-up exhibitions, including a ceramics show timed to coincide with last April’s NCECA conference in Detroit. Rachel Stewart, CEO of GW Home, one of ArtClvb’s early partners, describes the joint effort as a compelling way to connect Detroit artists with the local community. She notes that their relationship has made it possible to bring strong local work into the store in a format that feels approachable. ArtClvb is extending that model this summer by teaming up with smaller independent retailers such as Coup D’état and a cluster of downtown shops, while also partnering with nearby outlets for larger national brands including Design Within Reach and Bonobo.

Institutional collaborations are another promising lane of growth. The College for Creative Studies has partnered with the platform to facilitate sales through its galleries, while Michigan State University has developed its own cooperative relationship. ArtClvb has curated selections for a University of Michigan program placing artworks in student dormitories, an arrangement that improves the odds that students might begin living with something better than a poster held up by masking tape and optimism. Additional joint ventures include programs that place artworks in clinics and hospitals, including Corewell Health and Henry Ford Health.

A woman in a beige dress and boots observes three colorful abstract sculptures on mint-green pedestals in a sunlit, industrial-style room with pale brick walls.

Artwork by Jessika Edgar at Detroit Warehouse: Art and Design Fair/Photo: Martin Milat

ArtClvb’s most recent public outing was again during Detroit’s Month of Design last fall. Over three days, Detroit Warehouse took over the Boyer Campbell Building from top to bottom, filling it with fine art and handmade designer furnishings. The art was curated by Cranbrook Art Museum’s Katy Kim, the design section by industrial product designer Bilge Nur Saltik. Attendance rose by a third from the previous edition and sales climbed too, proof that once audiences know where to go, they may arrive with fewer inhibitions and better intentions. ArtClvb plans to return, in partnership with Bedrock, bringing yet another art fair to downtown Detroit and turning a few more people on to the dangerous habit of buying real art.

ArtClvb now faces a welcome hazard of success: how to scale a platform representing more than 800 artists without turning into the very kind of impersonal machine it set out to challenge. Guided by a Midwestern combination of hard-headed practicality and altruism—two qualities that rarely trend but often get results—the team remains focused on helping as many artists as possible build sustainable practices through sales. “Our goal is to get real work by living artists into the hands of young collectors,” says Steve Coy, “and, wherever possible, retire some of the mass-produced decor currently pretending to be art.”

Published in the print edition of the July-August 2026 issue, with the headline “Collectors Not Consumers: How ArtClvb is Working to Replace Mass-Produced Decor with Real Art by Living Artists.”