The Shepherd/Photo: Jason Keen
From the Art in Michigan guide, which appeared in Newcity’s July-August 2026 issue.
So the congregants of Our Lady Queen of Heaven-Good Shepherd describe the Church of the Annunciation, erected on Parkview, near Jefferson Avenue, in Detroit, Michigan, and consecrated on Christmas Day, 1912:
The arches of the nave and the transepts meet in a low dome skillfully designed in the lacunar style, representing sunken panels. The design of the dome is repeated and balanced by the sunken panels of the rounded apse, or altar recess, within the sanctuary, and by the meeting arches of the nave and the transept are united in one impressive structure of grace and strength.
Encircling the apse are stained-glass windows that shed soft light onto holy sacraments and vignettes of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Most unusual, the description notes, is a window depicting a scene of Christ driving moneychangers out of the temple.
More than a century later, the structure of grace and strength persists. But change, and money, have a way of coming back.
Religious parallels are unavoidable in speaking of the Shepherd, the contemporary arts space that, since opening in the vacated Church of Annunciation in 2024, has been the centerpiece of a breathtakingly ambitious cultural district on the east side of Detroit. They begin with the name itself, a reference to the Good Shepherd parish, the church’s previous occupant. A review in Architectural Digest packs double the pun: the former church “has risen again,” amid a “newly christened” neighborhood. Still, it is best to avoid overextending the metaphor: the new landlords of the Shepherd bristle at being characterized as the complex’s savior.
By the time Anthony and JJ Curis—partners in business and in life—moved to purchase the deconsecrated Good Shepherd building and its three-and-a-half acre parcel, they had already accumulated years of experience in both real estate development and the arts. Anthony was raised in metro Detroit and worked in a family real estate office. JJ, originally from Indianapolis and trained in finance, relocated to Detroit full-time in 2007. Downtown Detroit had yet to find its confident stride, but the Curises sensed that a shift was underway. In 2011, Anthony was involved with redeveloping a downtown building when a deal with a ground-floor tenant fell apart. By the following year, the pair launched the art gallery Library Street Collective in the building’s storefront.
“We were very naive, to be honest,” Anthony Curis says. “We imagined we’d stay in our current professions, but we had a crazy idea to open a gallery.” Downtown Detroit was a risky proposition but as with all risks, it had an upside. “In hindsight, the idea of opening a gallery downtown was challenging. The city was going through growing pains, things changing and developing very, very quickly,” he recalls. The timing for Library Street Collective proved to be extraordinarily lucky.
Detroit’s central business district had been targeted for investment in the previous decade by billionaire Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, an umbrella company that includes the mortgage giant Quicken Loans. The scope of the acquisition was unprecedented for a major American city. According to a report issued by the Brookings Institution, “by the beginning of 2017, Rock Ventures had acquired and rehabilitated over ninety buildings and brought over 16,000 employees downtown.” Rock Ventures snapped up skyscrapers at bargain-basement prices. Vacancy rates fell. Tech workers arrived. Retail and hospitality followed. The Brookings report estimates that “one quarter of all workers in downtown Detroit now work for Gilbert’s companies. The Rock Ventures parcels, totaling sixty-three acres, are an estimated thirteen percent of the non-roadway acreage in downtown.” Put another way, Rock Ventures emerged as the majority shareholder of downtown Detroit. And downtown Detroit increasingly functioned like a campus.
Brookings defines three essential conditions necessary to catalyze urban change. The first, “patient equity,” means that investors have the capacity to delay or even relinquish short-term returns, or the willingness to accept below-market returns. The second condition, “integrated development,” means that multiple sites in close proximity are owned or controlled by a single entity. Finally, “employment” means that the key to economic sustainability is to attract and retain a workforce. The revitalization of downtown Detroit is a classic case study in not only meeting these conditions, but in making them.
“If you’re able to mobilize these three, you can transform a district,” says Nate Storring, co-executive director of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit consultancy renowned for introducing the concept of placemaking into urban revitalization. The classic definition of placemaking according to Storring—and the paradigm on which PPS operates—is “a community process around changing the way that people perceive and use public space. It’s not an aesthetic or product; it’s not just the furniture between buildings.” PPS’s involvement in Detroit dates back to 1999 when its plan called for relocating Campus Martius Park, a small plaza punctuated by a historic obelisk. The proposed location would have a dual advantage: it realigns surface streets into calmer circulation, and lends downtown a geographic and symbolic center. The relocation plan moved forward and new development clustered along the blocks radiating from a central node.
Storring says that enhancement to the city’s public realm helped to convince private owners to adopt a long-term perspective: “Campus Martius was the reason why companies even started moving downtown. Patient equity tends to align with the public good; there are still points of tension, but there is more room for long-term public good.”
Just as the Library Street Collective opened its doors on an adjacent block, PPS revisited its old project, this time at the invitation of Rock Ventures. “We returned in 2013 to help come up with the idea of ‘the beach’ in Campus Martius,” says Storring. “It was an experiment in corporate social responsibility engaging with public space.” The so-called beach was conceived as a cheeky, slightly surreal retort to the plaza’s urban surroundings (and to Detroit’s notoriously miserable winters). Downtown workers walked out of offices to spread blankets on a patch of sand, order cocktails, take in live music, and supinely gaze into the urban canyon. In the face of bleak Detroit weather, Campus Martius—aggressively programmed with a roster of cultural events and performances—maintained a sunny disposition. The beach, however, was only part of a broader strategy, promoted by Rock Ventures, to saturate the downtown landscape with the arts. Art in public spaces, the thinking went, attracts visitors, retains the commuter workforce, and burnishes the reputation of the district. And, in the process, this doubtless “public good” promises a return on private investment.
The Shepherd, February 2024/Photo: Jason Keen
The Library Street Collective placed an early curatorial emphasis on street art, a form that, definitionally, does not thrive in captivity. The Curises began featuring prominent Detroit street artists and, eventually, the likes of internationally known Shepard Fairey. The gallery brought visibility to emerging creatives of color and embraced a generation of prominent Black artists, including McArthur Binion and Detroiter Charles McGee, whose careers had been denied consistent representation or institutional recognition.
Library Street’s exhibitions typically unfold beyond the gallery’s footprint. Often presented at multiple sites, created with partner organizations, and spilling out onto the street, Library Street’s projects can feel expansive, approachable—experiential to the point that one may be forgiven for not immediately recognizing them as art. The gallery produced a temporary skateboard park, complete with brightly colored ramps and quarter pipes, designed by the pro skating pioneer Tony Hawk and graphic designer Ryan McGinness. The park straddled the site of a proposed Rock Ventures building. Likewise, a collaboration with wheatpaste artist Caledonia Curry, known by her nom de guerre Swoon, in 2016, is exemplary of Library Street’s preferred position at the convergence of institutional, public and commercial spheres. In addition to showing Swoon’s work at Library Street, the Curises coordinated an installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts, hosted a community art-making session in a neighborhood, and oversaw a commission for one of Rock Ventures’ office buildings. By then, Rock Ventures and Library Street had established a working rapport.
From the outset, Curis considered the gallery floor not as limitation but provocation. He wanted to “see if we can leverage the brick and mortar of a gallery for community impact. The Belt was how we started.” Like the Campus Martius beach, the Belt insinuates art into the gap between the public and the private.
The Belt was once a quotidian space: a narrow service alley flanked by a parking deck on one side and a row of blank backs of commercial buildings on the other. But its proximity to Campus Martius and the concentration of abutting Rock Ventures properties, including the parking structure, made the alley an ideal candidate for cosmetic surgery. The metamorphosis from back alley to entertainment destination was initially precipitated by an architectural problem: a cocktail bar, then being built out in one of the buildings along the alley, required a means of egress, but the front entrance was unavailable because of ongoing construction. Curis, who holds an ownership stake in the bar, walked the construction site with his architects. They agreed on a solution—the bar would be accessed Prohibition era-style, through an inconspicuous door facing the alley. That impulse set in motion a sequence of improvements, gradually replacing grime with seating, vibey lighting and taco takeout windows. The alley’s upscaled identity as the Belt is consolidated by large-scale wall murals—sponsored by Rock Ventures and curated by Library Street.
The Belt’s success as a placemaking prototype is thoroughly documented; even were it not, it is attested, on any weekend night, by throngs of visitors who share the right-of-way with bench seats, food smells, occasional rodents, and, of course, artwork.
Adriel Thornton, executive director at the Museum of Detroit Electronic Music, was among the partners that Library Street recruited to energize the Belt. Thornton, whose decades-long tenure in the Detroit cultural scene trained him to be skeptical of newcomers with grandiose ideas, sees the Curises’ diffuse, partner-based style as a prerequisite for working in the city. “These are people who have means and resources. But this is a bellwether for me: every time I come across them, the Curises always come with respect.” Respect toward peer organizations and practicing artists, Thornton says, has given Library Street the credibility to mobilize a network that stretches from neighborhood activists to blue-chip art collectors. “You can say whatever you want about [Anthony and JJ Curis], but they’re definitely not carpetbaggers.”
“They’re not doing the performative shit, just to get some bodies in the door,” Thornton says of the Shepherd. “The most positive thing I’ve heard was from the people who live in the neighborhood. It’s a great use of what’s already there.” Others have attempted to speculate on the latent assets of Detroit neighborhoods. Redevelopment schemes proliferated, particularly in the aftermath of a municipal bankruptcy filing in 2013. With the city government seeking creative ways to pave a fiscal pothole some $20 billion deep, private interests closed in. Some, fortified with patient equity, capitalized on property portfolios. Others proposed fantastical ideas, like rewilding portions of the city, or turning Belle Isle, a public park on a Detroit River island, into a libertarian outpost, a Macau of the Midwest. “It took people like two minutes to figure out it was some bullshit,” Thornton says, dismissively. The Shepherd is different. “But that’s not the case with this; it’s about being maintained to a level, in a neighborhood where they had community meetings, where people showed up.”
They may have a common blueprint, but the Belt is to the Shepherd as a belfry to a cathedral. One voices an intention. The other fills a purpose.
The Lantern/Photo: Jason Keen
The alliance between art and real estate is by now so familiar as to be unremarkable. The long plot of arts patronage winds through Athenian temples, monumental carvings of Great Zimbabwe, the gilding of Florentine palaces. In this century, community murals, projection mapping and ubiquitous plop art signal not merely virtue but value. As much as a natural grocery store or high-performing public school, the presence of art in a neighborhood reliably accrues to property values. Detroit’s much-celebrated resurgence, decades in the making, has been a continuing case study in aligning incentives—economic but also reputational—that harness the arts to real estate. Its most ambitious, most fully realized expression is the Little Village cultural district, where the Shepherd exudes an auric influence over a landscape of residential blocks, scores of historic buildings and a post-industrial waterfront.
Nearly a decade in, Curis says, the Library Street Collective synced with Detroit’s zeitgeist. “We thought about how the gallery would evolve and continue to grow, what was the next chapter, where does it exist. And that’s when the Shepherd came along.”
“We knew we wanted to be in a neighborhood wanting to do something ambitious and exciting and also impactful,” he says. “One of the community groups on the east side”—the nonprofit East Village Association—“tipped us off to a church. It was no longer a place of worship, deaccessioned by the Diocese. It was very challenged and hasn’t been touched in years. But everything about it, historically and spiritually and architecturally, spoke to us.” Plus, it was ideally suited for integrated development. “It had a rectory, additional lots, parking. That enabled us to think beyond just the structure.”
Little Village is a neologism for a geographic construct, rather than a well-defined place. Detroiters of a certain age know this collection of neighborhoods by various place names, of which the Villages is the most encompassing. The district is located toward the city’s edge, five miles’ straight drive down Jefferson Avenue from downtown, the road slowing toward the suburban frontier. Canada is a few hundred yards distant, visible across the water. Near to where the Detroit River widens to greet Lake St. Clair, the shoreline is toothy with boat docks. Channels cut through boatyards. Belle Isle, the park designed in the Beaux-Arts manner by Frederick Law Olmsted and, in recent years, threatened by bankruptcy, is reachable by an iron-railed bridge. During postwar decades of citywide disinvestment, this part of the city managed to retain a cultural and commercial pulse. Mainstays such as craft tile studio Pewabic Pottery, the white-tablecloth Roostertail events venue frequented by political elites, the official mayoral residence at the Manoogian Mansion, and a patchwork of verdant turn-of-the-century residential blocks enveloped the Villages in the air of genteel protection. In recent years, rehabbers and entrepreneurs have steadily trickled in.
The City of Detroit comprises nearly one-hundred-and-forty square miles. But the density of its population is half that of car-dominated Los Angeles and more than five times lower than New York City. This is why a tightly defined geographic locus, such as the one demonstrated by Campus Martius, is of special concern in Detroit’s redevelopment. “The challenge,” Curis says, “is that there’s a lot of things happening but they’re all spread out.” News traveled fast about the plan to expand the Library Street Collective into the Villages. Curis recalls that, in the post-pandemic atmosphere of uncertainty, his network was energized. “Even before [the Shepherd] opened, it started to serve as a catalyst. These organizations started coming to us. We found that bringing a lot of organizations together can be impactful, so we started getting a lot of collaborators reaching out to us.”
Density or, more appropriately, its lack, is one of Detroit’s great seductions and its Achilles’ heel. Decades of depopulation made the land economics of the city a draw for artists who had been priced out of major metropolitan markets—and for fortune-seekers lured by promises of a quick flip. But population numbers also determine the provision of city services and infrastructure improvements; low-density areas suffer from poor access to schools, groceries, transit and other amenities that thrive in populated, walkable areas. Russell Baltimore, who oversees design review at the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department, has watched Little Village perform a densification balancing act. “Money stretches further,” he says. “There’s artists that I know that could never do things like this in other cities.” On one hand, “you can do a lot more here then, like, if you’re in New York City or Chicago. Everything is less expensive than other cities,” he adds, “but our infrastructure is not as well-developed as those other cities. We have a very strong art and culture network, but it is [about] scale. There are just more people in Chicago and New York.”
The Shepherd/Photo: Jason Keen
The City of Detroit has been attempting, through a mix of initiatives and incentives, to encourage what it calls “twenty-minute neighborhoods” in which basic quality-of-life amenities are available within a manageable walk or bicycle ride. Such social engineering efforts, however, are inseparable from the movements of private enterprise. City authorities need to convince rehabbers and shopkeepers and dry cleaners and a host of others to follow along into communities that, counterintuitively, lack the very conditions—foot traffic, infrastructure, proximity—that sustain commerce. Before the Shepherd, Baltimore says, “there have been a couple of churches that have tried this in the past, but this is the one that had something behind it.” The difference between projects that struggle and those that prosper is the density that they can generate on their own, much as an object with enough mass exerts its own force of gravity. Library Street, he believes, “had some good partners behind it. It’s a good model for how private [enterprise], philanthropy and the city are all working together to make this thing happen. Getting the right team, and the right funding, is probably the biggest challenge”—and the surest predictor of success—for such projects.
No one in the city was quite prepared for the gravitational pull that the Shepherd was to exert. Not one of the neighborhood plans carefully prepared over the years by municipal agencies or community groups could predict that, nearly overnight, the Villages would emerge as a neighborhood of choice for artists and their patrons. Baltimore says, shrugging: “I don’t believe it was anticipated.”
The program for the Shepherd, Curis says, came together incrementally and in consultation with community groups in the Villages and Library Street’s close partners. While the former church was still undergoing restoration, spaces were earmarked for rotating exhibitions, a restaurant and wine bar, retail, community meeting spaces and a repository of books focused on Detroit’s Black art and design legacy. The rectory building was reimagined as a bed-and-breakfast and artist residency. Two outdoor open spaces—one featuring artist Charles McGee’s sculptures, the other a permanent skateboarding park designed in collaboration with Tony Hawk—complete the site.
The Curises realized there was more demand than the Shepherd could accommodate on its own. The Shepherd’s boundaries bled farther off the site, until they dissolved into the more amorphous, and still developing, Little Village “cultural corridor.” “Organizations were interested in finding some space,” Curis says. Signal Return, a letterpress nonprofit, and Progressive Art Studio Collective, which serves artists with disabilities, “were looking for space and it gave us the courage to buy this other building.” Renamed the Lantern, the former bakery now also houses “an amazing bar, fashion boutique, artist studios in the building.” More followed: “a literary arts organization reached out to us. Now InsideOut Literary Arts is a tenant there, a small book store, and a homewares and vintage furniture store.” Curis adds that another restored building is being refitted to allow Pewabic Pottery and Progressive Arts Studio Collective to launch a cooperative ceramics studio.
Stanton Yards site plan/Courtesy Office for Strategy + Design (OSD)
Projects beget projects beget projects. The Little Village website now lists eighteen active or completed entries that range from standalone homes to trail networks. Among the latest of these, and the largest to date, is Stanton Yards, a riverfront development that will fold new cultural facilities, public spaces and boat slips into a thirteen-acre parcel. It will be anchored by the twenty-thousand-square-foot Lumana, a multipurpose art space funded by Jennifer Gilbert, ex-wife of Rock Ventures head Dan Gilbert. Construction crews are expected to break ground this fall.
Stanton Yards was decommissioned by the U.S. Navy and has since been used for boat storage and maintenance. Though it feels a world apart, only the asphalt lanes of Jefferson Avenue separate this spit of land from the nucleus of Little Village, where the Shephard, Lantern, and other venues cluster. Previous owners added insult to injury by installing an impenetrable false façade along the streetfront, its fencing hung with “No Trespassing” signs. Curis highlights two outcomes for Stanton Yards, the first “transitioning the buildings to more desirable uses.” This references some 80,000 square feet of the proposed campus—including Lumana—and a marina intended for pleasure cruisers and liveaboards. The Curises are also in talks with the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum to locate an extension at Stanton Yards—an idea, Curis says, suggested by a local resident.
Stanton Yards OSD rendering/Bloom images, courtesy of LSC
The other outcome is to open up public access to the waterfront. In the pre-development phase, the Curises have focused on reestablishing communication between the Shepherd on one side of Jefferson Avenue and the Detroit River waterfront on the other. “Historically,” Curis says, “you had a gate there—if you had a slip there, you can get in. Our goal is to reopen the alleys” that will continue a gridwork of pedestrian paths on both sides of the thoroughfare. As in downtown redevelopment a decade earlier, at this urban scale, private-sector and philanthropic resources need to be complemented by public infrastructure; “a whole other component could be working with the City to create pedestrian experiences and help reinforce that connection across Jefferson,” he says. Baltimore, of the Planning and Development Department, confirms that improving Jefferson Avenue is a priority for the City.
“There’s more stuff I can’t disclose but it fits within that range: arts, nonprofits, performance,” Curis says. Yet he is careful to avoid the impression that the Curises and their affiliated entities are pursuing a path of expansion. He prefers to narrate the Little Village story not as a linear one—a column marching toward an outcome—but additive, like onion-skin sketches stacked on a drafting table. “We are doing important work, and others are doing important work here, too.”
Romeo Okwara’s stake in Little Village offers a glimpse of this overlap. When Okwara first came to the area in 2018 to play for the Detroit Lions, mutual friends introduced him to Curis. Outside of playing defense for the next six seasons, Okwara cultivated an interest in photography and, after an injury forced his retirement from professional sports, pursued a photography MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. When Okwara contemplated establishing a photography studio and residency, Little Village was an obvious choice. “Okwara had an ambition to create a resource for photographers,” Curis says. “So he bought a building and created a nonprofit photography hub and residency.” Akwara’s nonprofit Middle Gray, opened in 2025, occupies a building barely two blocks from the Shepherd, where it offers programs for “emerging and established photographers [to] fully immerse themselves in their practice through various photographic processes.”
Critics point out that the collusion of art and development raises the specter of gentrification. In the snark of critical vocabulary, labels such as “artwashing” and “placefaking” suggest a cynical manipulation of the market by substituting conspicuous gilt for authentic substance. Anti-gentrification discourse casts generic public art, pop-up craft fairs and storefront galleries as superficial fig leaves that conceal mercenary motives. Activists in Los Angeles, for instance, protested an arts district on the grounds that “the advent of galleries signifies the preliminary state of increasing rent and exploiting its current residents.” Arts venues, by these accounts, are Trojan Horses poised at the gates of the city.
This tension was revealed in two Massachusetts towns, where large-scale public mural festivals illustrate the extent to which underlying economics dictate the response to placemaking. In Salem, an initiative to install murals throughout a working-class, predominantly Latino neighborhood is celebrated as destigmatization; there, the bulk of the housing stock is held by a nonprofit community development corporation, which assures affordability. In nearby Lynn, where no such assurance is extended, an otherwise identical public art strategy has faced skepticism.
“New ideas must use old buildings,” Jane Jacobs famously said, arguing for the value of preservation and adaptive reuse. Artists are often in the vanguard of forces animating structures overlooked by the traditional market. Yet when ideas outgrow buildings, drifting across neighborhoods, sweeping up philanthropists and developers, and reweaving the fabric of an entire city, the value proposition may be harder to calculate. If Curis is unflaggingly bullish about his bet on Little Village, he is more ambivalent about playing the part of a property magnate: “This is definitely not a traditional real estate portfolio.
“I understand development. I came from that world, but I didn’t necessarily love it,” he says. “Now it’s full circle, coming to it from the arts. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, in a traditional way.”
The Shepherd/Photo: Jason Keen
To enter the Shepherd, visitors first pass through the Charles McGee Legacy Park. There, they encounter towering images of Afrocentric figures and animals bestride the Romanesque brick courses of the former church. The Curises had been steady supporters of McGee, and these pieces represent the late sculptor’s final commission, co-sponsored by the Gilbert family. Silhouetted against the building, McGee’s sculptures are kinetic, impatient, bursting with optimism, busy making a myth of their own. Children delight in exploring the landscape. Curis knows this would please McGee.
McGee’s influence is perhaps less obvious but no less important on Heidelberg Street, a few miles away from Little Village. The Heidelberg Project is now a calling card for Detroit—a surreal artist-made environment that incorporates paint and found objects into a block of vacant houses and fallow lots. In 1986, Tyree Guyton found his neighborhood abandoned. He took up a paintbrush to draw attention to its downfall, to make sense of Detroit’s desperation. Against odds, at the risk of official demolition and casual arson, with no donors and few friends, Guyton reworked blight into something approaching awe. But the story of the Heidelberg Project starts earlier, when Guyton was training as an artist. Andrew Sturm, who was executive director of the Heidelberg Project until the end of June, has heard Guyton tell it time and again. Guyton remembers when, during a critique in art school, McGee approached his easel. McGee picked up a thick marker and made strokes directly onto Guyton’s finished canvas. Guyton had been struggling as a student and for a moment, he thought the older, experienced painter was attacking his work. But McGee intended a different pedagogy. “Don’t be so precious about your art,” he told Guyton. McGee advised that Guyton reeducate himself. For a week, Guyton locked himself in a basement room with Coltrane records and paint. By the time he resurfaced, Guyton was prepared to take on Heidelberg.
Sturm says that to see the Heidelberg Project for what it is, one has to look past the art. Today, the Heidelberg Project stewards some fifty lots, leading neighborhood-wide cleanup. For decades, Guyton mowed grass on long-abandoned lots. He picked up debris. He trimmed branches. On a handful of blocks marooned in an American city, he is the custodian of forgotten places.
“Tyree [Guyton]’s medium is care,” Sturm says. The Heidelberg Project turns forty this year. Its fundraiser gala will be held at the Shepherd.
Published in the print edition of Newcity’s July/August 2026 issue, with the headline ‘Complex Savior: How Anthony and JJ Curis are Remaking Detroit with Art, Ambition and More Than a Little Help From Friends.'”
