Community Garden Lab for Eco-Creative Futures
Opening 2026
The Garden Lab for Eco Creative Futures will be a public community garden and communal space dedicated to sustainable research and experimentation across artistic disciplines. Rooted in the belief that art and ecology offer powerful frameworks for reimagining creative practice, the lab invites artists, neighbors, and the broader community to explore how artistic processes can respond to environmental challenges and deepen our relationship with the natural world.
The site also supports the local ecosystem by cultivating native pollinator habitat, rainwater management systems, and composting practices that contribute to a healthier urban landscape.
We look forward to sharing this living public space with you in 2026, welcoming neighbors, artists, and community members to gather, learn, and imagine more sustainable creative futures together.
Announcing the 2026 Applebaum Artists-in-Residence
The inaugural Applebaum Artists-in-Residence at the Garden Lab for Eco-Creative Futures is a new residency program in Detroit, MI, supporting artists working at the intersection of art, ecology, and community. The residency is made possible by Applebaum Family Philanthropy, offering artists the opportunity to use the garden as a site for research, experimentation, and public engagement, while working with ecological materials, environmental processes, and site-responsive artistic methods.
Brittanie Bondie
Brittanie Bondie is a process-based analogue photographer based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, working with plant-based and low-toxicity photographic methods. Drawing on ecofeminist and new materialist thought, her practice blurs the lines between photography, drawing and painting through tactile, material-driven processes. With or without the aid of a camera, her work treats light, chemistry, and the natural world as active collaborators, offering viewers a visual experience that exists between image and object.
She holds an MFA in Creative Photography from the University of Florida (2015), a BFA in Photography from Kendall College of Art and Design (2011), and a BA in Studio Art from Western Michigan University (2007). Her work has been
been featured in Aeonian Magazine and Woman Made Gallery's 25th International Open. Bondie is the recipient of an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center and a Graduate Fellowship from the University of Florida.
To see more of their work, visit:
Leslie Rogers
Leslie Rogers is a Detroit-based artist with roots in quilting and puppetry and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Fibers and Sculpture at the SMFA at Tufts University with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Sculpture & Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan.
She looks forward to continuing community-based plant projects while in residence. This follows a Summer 2025 dinner theater performance titled I Pooped the Seeds for the Food (self explanatory) and 99 Bottles Beverage Service featuring 99 different grown and foraged fermented herbal beverages with this summer’s Taming the Yeast//Wilding Our Hearts project—a collaboratively-reared, site-specific wild yeast cultivation—plus a series of natural dye experiments using foraged tannins reacted with either above-ground or soil-extracted metals. She has exhibited or performed at The Hammer Museum, Human Resources, Threewalls, Links Hall, ACRE TV, The Mattress Factory, The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the ICA Philadelphia. In Detroit, she has exhibited at Cave Gallery, Public Pool, Wasserman Projects, The College for Creative Studies, with Fiber Club* as part of Detroit Month of Design, and others. In Philadelphia, she curated exhibitions and performances for Little Berlin and Puppet Uprising, co-founded and performed with PuppeTyranny, and exhibited at Fjord, Practice, Vox Populi, AUX, AWFUL Wrestling, International House, Bodega, Little Berlin, and others.
Rogers has been awarded residencies at Monson Arts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Craft, Jentel, The Soil Factory, Prairie Ronde, ACRE, AS220, Art Farm, and Mildred’s Lane.
To see more of their work, visit:
Ian John Solomon
Ian John Solomon (1997) is an interdisciplinary artist-journalist & organizer from Detroit, Michigan. Ian's lens based practice explores themes of identity, ancestral memory and environmental injustice. Deeply motivated by the environment, Ian’s practice asserts a relationship to land as a necessary vehicle for personal and communal actualization. He uses space and place as a foundation for urgent community conversations spanning the spiritual to the political, past and future. As the founder of ‘Amplify Outside’, a Detroit based outdoor organization and podcast as well as the Host of Emmy award winning PBS segment “Ian Outside” his visual art practice extends from a social & professional practice of connecting Black communities to natural spaces.
After receiving his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024 Ian has exhibited and won awards across the Midwest, including being a 2026 Modern Ancient Brown Foundation resident, 2026 Petty Propolis Visionary Resistance Fellow, 2025 Black Midwest Initiative Summer Institute Fellow and a 2024 Cranbrook Art Museum Purchase Award Nominee. Ian has received two Emmy nominations, an Emmy Award and a First Place in Environmental Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.
To see more of their work, visit:
About the Garden Lab for Eco-Creative Futures
The Garden Lab for Eco Creative Futures in Detroit is a pollinator habitat, outdoor classroom, and research site where art, ecology, and community intersect. Through workshops, artist residencies, and seasonal programming, the Garden Lab supports new approaches to creative practice that respond to environmental challenges and cultivate relationships between artists, communities, and the natural world.
Creative Body Institute is an artist-run nonprofit dedicated to embodied creative practice, artistic exchange, and site-responsive research across disciplines, including performance, live art, visual art, writing, sound, movement, and ecosomatics. Through residencies, courses, workshops, exhibitions, and publications, CBI supports artists in developing work that connects creative practice with social and environmental awareness.
For more information about the garden or questions regarding the residency program, please email eleanor@creativebody.org
