Arts & Culture

Wayne State University is developing a new, free program to help artists market their ideas better. It's called the Artrepreneurship program. That's right: a hybrid of art + entrepreneurship.

Wayne State University got a $25,000 grant from the Coleman foundation to start up the new program, which will mostly consist of a lecture series and the occasional workshop.

The Cost of Creativity

We put together our stories about arts and the economy in the state to create an hour-long documentary called The Cost of Creativity. On today's podcast, we'll hear the first installment of the doc.

And because Artpod is about all things Michigan, all the music you'll hear on The Cost of Creativity is by Michigan artists. The musicians featured on today's podcast: Ben Benjamin and Luke Winslow-King.

Today's topic for What's Working - "What can help Detroit?"

Morning Edition host Christina Shockley spoke with Susan Mosey, the President of the University Cultural Center Association (UCCA) at Wayne State University.

The UCCA aims to guide development, encourage reinvestment, and celebrate the cultural assets of Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood.

Lately, Midtown has become a source of optimism for Detroit.

You can listen to the interview here:

Michigan-based retail giant Meijer says it will now ship any of the items from its stores to any place in the world. Before now, customers could only get bulk items shipped to their homes.

Frank Guglielmi is a Meijer spokesman.

“There’s the customers who are familiar and predisposed towards Meijer who perhaps lived in the Midwest or Grand Rapids and have moved to other destinations and then there’s providing a good offering online for groceries for any consumer out there.”

If you had tuned your radio to WXYZ-Detroit on this day in 1936, you would have heard the inaugural broadcast of the masked hero,The Green Hornet.

Each week brought audiences the latest adventures of Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher by day and masked crusader by night, and his trusty side-kick, Kato.

You can listen to a sampling of the original programs at Archive.org.

Alexander Russo is an American media scholar at the Catholic University of America. He says The Green Hornet had a special appeal to listeners during the Great Depression who may have been frustrated with the lagging success of New Deal policies:

“In all of these characters, you have individuals who step outside the socially sanctioned ways of achieving social change and enacting it themselves.”

Today, The Green Hornet is a movie for the second time and has also been a television show.

The Green Hornet was created by George Trendle and Frank Striker.  Their previous radio productions included another masked hero - The Lone Ranger. 

-Bridget Bodnar, Michigan Radio Newsroom

Writer Bill Harris, a Wayne State University professor of English, has been named the 2011 Eminent Artist by the Kresge Foundation.

The award is given out to one Detroit artist every year. When writer Bill Harris found out he won the award, he was pretty surprised. No one had contacted him during the nomination process. In fact, he's not even sure who nominated him.

Harris was born and raised in Detroit and has been a fixture of the city's literary scene for decades. He's written plays, prose and poetry. The city is so much a part of him that he’s been told he writes with a ‘Detroit rhythm. ’