Detroit in Dayton: The Art of REVOK, Verdell and Richmond-Edwards

Rodney Veal
CET/Think^TV Producer and Community Arts Liaison

Detroit. The Motor City. The birthplace of the Motown sound. Few American cities have such a firm hold on our collective imagination. Many Daytonians of a certain age know that our city was once called “Little Detroit,” a nickname that made perfect sense. We were two innovative hubs connected by the I-75 corridor, as well as Dayton’s vital manufacturing role that kept America’s automotive industry moving from the 1950s well into the early 2000s.

For some, Detroit became emblematic of the decline of the American industrial city, a place where manufacturing once offered generations of Americans a pathway into the middle class before factories closed and neighborhoods were left struggling with what came next. But Detroit has refused to be defined solely by what it lost and instead has reimagined itself through creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

And so the Dayton-Detroit relationship extended far beyond factories and assembly lines, with both cities developing potent and distinctive musical identities. Detroit gave the world Motown and helped redefine electronic music and techno, and Dayton became one of the great incubators of funk. Both cities have also nurtured generations of visual artists working across abstraction, social justice, assemblage, graffiti, installation, film and countless other forms.There is a shared cultural DNA between the two, and I was thrilled to explore that connection and share it with our viewers on The Art Show.

Detroit also holds a very special place in my heart, being geographically close to where I spent my transformative undergraduate years. It was the early 1980s, and the evidence of urban decline and abandonment was impossible to ignore. But beneath that surface was something extraordinary: a creative ecosystem taking shape. My college friends and I spent many weekends exploring Detroit’s neighborhoods, galleries, clubs and cultural spaces. I encountered artists and musicians responding directly to the city around them, finding possibility in places other people had dismissed. It made me think differently about how society, history, place and even decline could become catalysts for artistic action. Three extraordinary Detroit-based artists embody that spirit of reinvention: Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Paul Verdell and Jason REVOK. Their distinct bodies of work came together right here in our city at The Contemporary Dayton.

For Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Detroit begins with culture and community. She speaks beautifully about growing up in a city where art was not separated from everyday life. Watching her mother get ready to go dancing and making up dance routines, the hair, the fashion and the beauty rituals were all part of her earliest understanding of creativity. As she puts it, not everyone might not have called it “art.” They simply called it culture. But there is something incredibly powerful about making that distinction. Art is not something placed at a distance, it is lived experience.

Richmond-Edwards also describes herself as a futurist, an artist interested in our capacity to dream and imagine new realities. Her work asks viewers not simply to look backward at history, but to envision themselves into worlds that might still be waiting to be created. In a city so often discussed through the language of what it has lost, that insistence on imagination and possibility feels especially meaningful.

Paul Verdell brought another dimension to this conversation. There is an immediacy and humanity to his work. He talks about the importance of the hand, wanting the work to remain gestural and visibly made by a human being. In an increasingly digital and automated world, that desire to preserve evidence of touch, gesture and the physical act of making feels almost radical.

Verdell was also drawn to Detroit because of its artistic community. After living and studying in Ohio, he found in Detroit a place where he could remain grounded without feeling overly constrained. His story adds another layer to the connection between our two states and our creative communities. Artists move back and forth across these geographic boundaries, carrying influences, relationships, and ideas with them.

And then there is Jason REVOK, whose relationship to Detroit’s physical landscape has quite literally entered his work. Jason spoke about exploring neighborhoods, commercial districts and industrial areas, collecting neglected architectural remnants from former homes, schools, churches and businesses. He describes them as materials containing the “ghosts of life lived.” Those fragments became raw material for making something entirely new. That idea stayed with me.

What does an artist see when standing before something society has abandoned? Where someone else might see debris, Jason sees history, material and possibility. His roots in graffiti also connect his practice to a long tradition of artists making new marks on cities and responding to the marks left by others. He describes graffiti as part of a larger artistic practice of call and response, not unlike music itself. And suddenly that Detroit-Dayton connection becomes even clearer.

Both of our cities know something about remnants. We know abandoned factories, changing neighborhoods and the complicated inheritance of once-mighty manufacturing economies. But we also know what it means to look at those remnants and ask what might come next.

That is what makes bringing Richmond-Edwards, Verdell and Jason REVOK together in Dayton so compelling. They are not presenting one singular idea of Detroit. Their practices are wonderfully different. Yet all three demonstrate ways artists can absorb the culture, history, physical landscape and communities around them and transform those experiences into something new. In fact, Verdell speaks warmly about Richmond-Edwards and Jason REVOK as fellow Detroit artists and mentors, which makes seeing their work together feel less like three isolated artistic practices and more like a glimpse into a genuine creative ecosystem.

Now, on the other side of Detroit’s much-discussed renaissance, I see parallels with what is happening right here in Dayton. Creatives in both cities are pushing beyond the old narrative of the decaying Rust Belt city. They are refusing to allow our communities to be defined solely by what closed, what disappeared or what used to be. Instead, artists like Richmond-Edwards, Verdell and REVOK are asking a much more interesting question: What can we imagine, create and build from what remains?

That question gets to the heart of why I love producing stories about arts and culture. The joy is not simply documenting what is already known. It is the constant voyage of discovery, digging beneath the surface, finding the artists, ideas and creative movements already taking shape around us, and connecting those discoveries to something larger. Sometimes that means looking hundreds of miles away. And sometimes, as this story reminded me, it means simply looking up I-75 and realizing that Detroit and Dayton have been in conversation with one another all along.

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