EXHIBITIONS | POPPS PACKING

Popps Packing + NCECA , March 2026

Popps Packing is excited to be part of NCECA’s 60th conference, Volumes, that takes place in Detroit, Michigan, March 25 – 28, 2026

Volumes, the 60th conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), explores material-driven experimentation and conceptual frameworks that animate art created through clay. The essential energy of voices and sounds of the Detroit region catalyzes this conference’s theme.

As part of the conference we are hosting two exciting exhibitions, featuring curators and artists from the region.

FRACTALS AND FAMILIAR THINGS

Curated by Zena Segre

On view: Mar 23-29 Tue–Sun 10:00AM–5:00PM (Thu open until 8:00PM) Fragments and Familiar Things reveals a constellation of ceramics educators whose entangled paths have shaped the fabric of Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. Featuring Liz McCarthy, Del Harrow, Ashwini Bhat, Marie Herwald Hermann, August S. Lantz, Chris Salas, Jack Troy, Saffronia Downing, Luka Carter, Nathan Tonning, and others.

THE CAR SHOW

Curated by Micah Lewis-Văn Sweezie

On view: Mar 24-28 Tue–Fri 10:00 AM–5:00PM (Thu open until 8:00PM), Sat 10:00AM–12:00PM

The Car Show is a ceramic group exhibition honoring Detroit’s automotive legacy. The exhibition explores the automobile as both object and symbol, examining its cultural and historical significance through clay. Artists include Janina Myronowa, Carly Slade, Vincent (Sniper) Frimpong, Tommy Lomeli, Jessica Brandl, Bradford Davis, David Morrison, Edward Salas, and others.

10/12/19 Sadie Nielson “Demons” @ Popps Emporium

“DEMONS” is a collection of demons rendered by Sadie Nielson, our September/October artist in residence. Over the course of Sadie’s first month at Popps, Sadie made a series of small paintings, and hanging fabric sculptures inspired at least in part by her recent increased awareness of the destructive nature of human activity on the earth as well as the existential threat it poses to itself.

Durable / Flexible, DEMONS

Durable/Flexible

12138 St. Aubin St. Hamtramck, MI 48212

September 21st – November 2nd
Saturdays 12-6PM

Durable/Flexible is a group exhibition that celebrates 10 years of cultivating, presenting and nurturing the arts and artists within our community and beyond. We have invited local and regional artists to submit original works that are loosely inspired by Aluminum and Tin, which are commonly associated with marking ten year milestones. More so than the the materials themselves we were interested in ideas around the properties of these metals that are often described as durable and flexible.

Demons, Sadie Nielson

2025 Carpenter, Detroit, MI 48212

Through November 2nd
Saturdays 12-6PM

“DEMONS”is a collection of demons rendered by Sadie Nielsen during her 2 month residency at Popps. Inspired in part by the destructive nature of human activity on the earth as well as the existential threat it poses to itself.

Sadie Nielsen is an artist who currently lives and works on the unceded coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, otherwise known as Victoria, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in 2019.

8/22/19 Regine Rode / Floral Hygiene

Popps Packing is excited to present, Floral Hygiene by Momm and Popp, Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellow, Regine Rode (DE)!

Rode began working primarily in sculpture and installation while living in LA where she received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Her works aim to disrupt the traditional forms of sculpture by intertwining autonomous elements from her current surroundings. Please join us for her most recent body of work, Floral Hygiene this Thursday from 6-9PM!

Floral Hygiene / Regine Rode

August 22, 6-9PM

@ Popps Emporium

2025 Carpenter, Detroit MI ,48212

5/30/19 Together We Sound Festival

Popps Packing is excited to be a part of the Together We Sound Festival in hosting a night of Detroit-based music with the Acropolis Reed Quintet, New Music Detroit, and Detroit Bureau of Sound+Kristen Carey & Chris Sies!

Thursday, May 30th from 7 pm – 11 pm @ Popps Packing 12138 St. Aubin St., Hamtramck, MI 48212

$10 door suggested donation (currently no advanced ticketing)
More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/2462225840456837/

5/23/19 Creators of Culture Grants Information Session

Join CultureSource at Popps Emporium for an info session on the 25 grants they offer to the creative arts community!

Many types of arts activities happen in Southeast Michigan regularly, and regardless of scope and scale, they can contribute to the vitality of our communities. Through this program, each year for the next three years, CultureSource will offer 25 $3,000 grants to creators of culture, in collaboration with the Detroit Arts Support program.

Thursday, May 23 from 5:30-7pm @ Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter St., Detroit, MI 48212

or learn more here: https://www.culturesource.org/resources/creators-of-culture-grants

5/18/19 (W)here: Opening Exhibition

Group exhibition with artists Ashely Beatty, Madelain Corbin, and Jeff Schofield

Opening Reception: Saturday May 18, 2019 from 6-9 PM

Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Popps Emporium presents a group art exhibition, “(W)HERE”, showcasing sustainable artwork by three locally based artists, Ashley Beatty, Madelaine Corbin and Jeff Schofield.

“(W)HERE” features artwork expressing humanity’s complicated relationships with natural landscapes and urban terrains. This exhibition explores critical narratives about our globalized civilization that convey ecological concerns of life in the Anthropocene. While celebrating natural phenomena as essential elements of human existence, “(W)HERE” also explores human transgressions of both natural and constructed environments.

https://www.facebook.com/events/324762941553816/

4/27/19: Macro View+ BYOBirdhouse

Opening Reception Saturday, April 27, 6-9PM

Macro View is the first exhibition in the newly renovate Popps Emporium Resource Space and features the macro photography of Joseph Ferraro who documents native pollinators and other invertebrates.
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BYOB ( Bring Your Own Birdhouse) is a garden installation of sculptural takes on birdhouses featuring Chris Riddell, Andy Kem, Julia Callis, James Viste, Graem Whyte, Bridget Michael, Sean Hages and more. Located in the gardens behind Popps Emporium.

April 27 -May 30, 2019

4/27/19: The Day Everything Became Nothing

New Works by Karin Karinson

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Saturday April 27, 2019 . 6PM -9PM

Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Popps Packing is excited to present the new works by spring artist in residence, Karin Karinson (Götaland, Sweden) for a one-night exhibition of a new body of work created during her two month residency at Popps Packing.

Karin is a sculpture artist, working primarily in clay and incorporating all stages, shapes and forms of the material into her work. Resting in the rivers of glossy glaze, she blends ready-made, found, porcelain objects with self-created sculptures; shards of people’s desires and fantasies, things forgotten, and left behind protrude through a dreamy manifestation of the fragmented natural world.
Learn more here and here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1210324182463367/?active_tab=about

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project by Ingrid LaFleur

Opening Reception:

Saturday May 5, 2015

6-9PM.

Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Guided Meditations on Sunday May 6, 13 and 20 at 2PM

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project outlines how to attain turiya, pure consciousness, in Hindu philosophy and investigates the theory that de-colonial futures can be created only when all trauma is cleansed from the body.

For this installation, Lafluer created a series of sculptures that utilize over twenty varieties of crystals such as pyrite, black tourmaline, amethyst, and bismuth, which she believes can heal traumas and help us transcend into the cosmos. The sculptural installation is accompanied by a sound essay that brings together the wisdom of Audre Lorde, Eartha Kitt, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

Transcending the human experience is the only safe place where futures can be imagined freely without limitation. LaFleur believes the map for the future can be found within the transcendent music meditations created by jazz musician and Hindu practitioner, Alice Coltrane. Inspired by the composition Galaxy in Turiya, LaFleur finds a kinship with Detroit born Coltrane and regards her as a Patron Saint of their hometown.

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project

May 5- May 26, 2018

Popps Emporium

2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Ingrid LaFleur is a cultural producer, arts advocate, pleasure activist, founder of AFROTOPIA, and former candidate for mayor of Detroit. LaFleur has developed and organized art exhibitions both nationally and internationally with a curatorial focus on
Afrofuturism. In 2013, LaFleur founded AFROTOPIA, an evolving creative research project that investigates the possibilities of using the arts movement Afrofuturism as psychosocial healing.

Within her artistic practice, using sculpture, sound, site-specific installation and performance, LaFleur further unpacks ideas around trauma, which have arisen as a result of audience engagement through AFROTOPIA. She has exhibited in BOOM City Detroit curated by Dashboard Co-op (2015); the Something Else Off Biennial, Cairo, Egypt curated by Simon Njami (2015); Future Africa-Visions in Time at the Iwalewahaus at University of Bayreuth, Germany (2015-ongoing); Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College; Take Root Among the Stars at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

LaFleur has presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA),
TEDxBrooklyn, TEDxDetroit, Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany), Ideas City, New Museum (New York), AfroTech Conference (Dortmund, Germany), and Black in Design at Harvard University, among others.

LaFleur is based in Detroit, Michigan.