The Heidelberg Project named a new executive director and announced plans to renovate its Number House, framing the work as the start of a shift toward becoming a working arts hub on its east side footprint.
Crain's Detroit Business reported the announcement on May 12. The Number House renovation is designed to create flexible space for Detroit artists, fledgling creative businesses, and community programming. It is also expected to generate earned revenue for the nonprofit. The report was written by Sherri Welch.
Tyree Guyton founded the Heidelberg Project in 1986 on Heidelberg Street on Detroit's east side, turning abandoned structures and vacant lots into a large-scale outdoor art environment. The city has demolished portions of it at different points over the decades. The project rebuilt and reorganized as a nonprofit. It has operated continuously since. The Number House is one of its long-standing structures.
Renovating that building for flexible artist and business tenancy is a move toward earned income. Grants and donations are unreliable at scale. Space rental is more predictable. The Heidelberg Project is not unique in trying to make this transition. Nonprofits across Detroit's arts sector have been working toward hybrid models that generate revenue from owned or leased space while maintaining their public mission. The question is whether the Heidelberg Project can do it without losing what actually makes it significant: a large-scale public art environment built out of Detroit's abandoned stock, in a neighborhood that did not ask for it and has lived with it for nearly four decades. Whether the renovation delivers on the earned-income promise is a question for after the work is done and tenants are actually in the building.
The framing as an arts hub is the kind of language that shows up in a lot of Detroit cultural announcements. What it means here, practically, is a building that artists and small creative businesses can rent, with some portion held for community programming. That is a reasonable thing to build. Whether the Heidelberg Project can execute the renovation, manage tenant relationships, and stay recognizable as a public art institution while doing so is the harder set of questions.
Bringing in a new executive director alongside the renovation is the right sequence. Running a building with tenants requires a different operational focus than running an outdoor installation. Whoever comes into the role is inheriting a clear set of problems and a fairly specific mandate: make the Number House work financially without turning the project into a real estate operation.
The Heidelberg Project has been working toward this kind of model for years. The Number House renovation is the most concrete version of it yet.
The Heidelberg Project is on Heidelberg Street on Detroit's east side.
