SaveArtSpace in partnership with Norwest Gallery of Art is proud to present Sustain-A-City: Art for Environmental Justice, a public art exhibition on billboard ad space in Detroit, MI, starting September 8, 2024, curated by Asia Hamilton.

The Sustain-A-City selected artists are Daizydoodles, Halima Afi Cassells & Shanna Merola, Phillip Simpson, Doug Jones, DaJaniere Rice, Allan Creary, Hadassah GreenSky, Anthea Calhoun, and DDDMPEG.

This exhibition will explore the intersection of environmental justice, sustainability, and cultural resilience. Highlighting how marginalized communities bear the brunt of environmental degradation while celebrating their efforts to reclaim and protect their natural spaces. Merging art, activism, and storytelling to advocate for equitable environmental policies and practices.

These artworks offer powerful visions of a resilient and sustainable future for the city. Our goal is to center art as a tool to envision a community at its best—a thriving, environmentally friendly ecosystem. “By placing these messages in public view, we empower the community to see sustainability as something accessible, urgent, and community-driven.”

We invite artists of all ages and talents to submit their artwork between June 20 and July 28, 2025. This is an opportunity to have your work exhibited on billboard ad space in Detroit, MI.

Opening September 8, 2025 SaveArtSpace will launch a public art installations for the selected artworks on billboard ad space in Detroit. The public art will be on view for up to four weeks.

Selected Artists

Megan Rizzo aka Daizydoodles, a Detroit native, has been a freelance illustrator for over six years. She has a Bachelor’s of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Masters from Wayne State University in Art Therapy. Megan has work with over a handful of authors and has illustrated more than fifteen children’s and young adult publications. She continues to use her skills to create editorial pieces for publications such as the University of Michigan, EATER magazine, Shado Mag and even the LA Times. You can also find her work supporting local groups such as Sidewalk Detroit and 826 Michigan.

Connect with Daizydoodles at @daizydoodles.

Artist Statement:

In this piece we see women and mothers interconnected throughout the ecosystem as stewards of the land - protecting and nurturing each other and future generations. One figure keeps watch from the base of the Flint water tower, while hands throw an offering of flowers into the Detroit River on Belle Isle. There is tenderness, protection, worry, and joy as these figures bear witness to history and shape its course along the water’s edge. The concept for this piece is two-fold. On one hand, it demonstrates the slow violence of extraction, deregulation, and austerity measures burdening predominantly Black cities across the U.S. like Detroit and Flint, MI. Simultaneously, it honors the legacy of resistance, collective liberation, and care that reverberate through our city streets and neighborhoods along networks of mutual aid. With women and mothers as the backbone of these movements we have witnessed visionary models of organizing for environmental justice, housing, and water rights as a response to these recent attacks on longtime residents and working-class families.

Historical context: In 2014 the Detroit Water and Sewage Department instated the largest water shutoff campaign in U.S. history, cutting service to over 20,000 residents without regard to health needs or ability to pay. The unprecedented act of cutting off water to 3,000 households per week brought criticism, both nationally and internationally. News spread quickly due to the efforts of water rights activists between the US and Canada, bringing representatives from the UN to Detroit in October of 2014. During their investigation the United Nations declared that the city was violating thousands of residents' fundamental human right to access clean, affordable water.

Artist Bio Halima Afi Cassells:

Halima Afi Cassells (b. 1981) is an award-winning interdisciplinary community-engaged artist, mom of three, avid gardener, with deep roots in Waawiiyaataanong/ Detroit, MI. Born into a creative family, her parents photographed her unsolicited murals and fashions as a kid, encouraging her exploration. Community is the heart of her work. She credits gardening as inspiring her move away from painting to a practice where she aspires to use natural, found, and up-cycled materials and processes that lend to the thriving of all (human and non-human) communities. Halima continues to explore relationship-building, and the notions of freedom and work, value and disposability in a participatory context through projects like the Free Market of Detroit, Traveling Indigo Vat, and her Tables and Thrones series.

Awarded the 2023 Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship for interdisciplinary art, Cassells continually dives down rabbit holes seeking to understand the interconnectedness of systems and self. A self-guided student of anthropology, macroeconomics, British imperialism and common law, global corporatism, climate crisis, and psychology; she uses her art with the intent of returning to a 'right relationship.' As an advocate for artists and cultural practitioners, she has spearheaded many community processes that uplift cultural capital from often-exploited communities and creates in a collaborative context. She has been awarded grants from: Panta Rhea Foundation, BulkSpace, WDET, Art Matters, Culture Source, Knight Foundation Arts Challenge, and Artplace America. In addition to Detroit, her work has been featured in spaces in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Oakland CA, Oaxaca, Berlin, Copenhagen, Bogota, and Harare.

Connect with Halima at @halima_afi.

Artist Bio Shanna Merola:

Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photographer, and legal worker. Her sculptural photo-collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Travelling to EPA designated Superfund sites, she has documented the slow violence of deregulation – from her own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY. In addition to her studio practice she has ten years of experience working in civil rights law through the National Lawyers Guild Detroit and San Francisco Chapters.

Merola has been awarded studio residencies through MacDowell, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Foundation House, and Kala Institute of Art. She has received fellowships and grants through the Kresge Arts Foundation, Society for Photographic Education, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Generator Arts Accelerator, the Puffin Foundation, Bulk Space, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Her collaborative projects and public interventions include Detroit Resists: A Digital Occupation of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2016), Oil + Water: Photography in the Age of Disaster Economies with Kate Levy (2017) Reunioning with Halima Afi Cassells (2019) and Swan Song with Halima Afi Cassells at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2022-2023). Merola has shown her work in solo exhibitions both nationally and abroad at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. She has held teaching appointments at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Wayne State University, the College for Creative Studies, and in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley in California.

Connect with Shanna at @shannamerola.

Phillip Simpson

Connect with Phillip at @artbyphillipsimpson.

Doug Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice bridges cartography, psychology, and ecology through immersive digital and material forms. Rooted in Michigan, his work maps diverse histories and the epigenetic traces of culture, ecological memory, and the meanings we project onto images, land, and objects. Drawing from backgrounds in education and cognitive psychology, Jones creates artifacts and experiences that explore overlapping cultural, social, and environmental systems. A Cranbrook MFA (2022) and American Institute of Architects National Champion (2018), Jones situates Black ecologies and contemporary cartographies within global conversations on survival, imagination, and the futures of place.

Artist Statement:

My Maroon series reflects on the earliest histories of Black life in Michigan—where freedom meant survival in untamed landscapes. These works look to the wild as refuge and resistance, asking how we might reimagine our relationship with land and water today. In a time of climate crisis, Detroit reminds us that survival and imagination are inseparable.

Connect with Doug at @douglasjonesartdesign.

DaJaniere Rice

Connect with DaJaniere at @.

Contemporary Pop Artist, Born in Jamaica, Allan Creary has grown into a military veteran, an artist, and graphic designer with over 10 years of experience as a self-taught artist. His portfolio includes various accomplishments, including collaborations with multiple artists, businesses, art galleries, and was featured in the Black.Art.Matters. event featuring Palm Beach County artists February 2022, curated by the City of Downtown West Palm Beach, FLAVAR Exhibit at Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach May-June 2022, and the featured artist for Palm Beach County’s Month of Shows, Art, Ideas and Culture (MOSAIC) for May 2024, and a feature in the South Florida PBS series On the Town in the Palm Beaches in September 2024. In March 2025, he was selected of 1 of 5 artists chosen for Endless Summer, The Commons: 5 Artists 5 Spaces Public Art Project where his art was featured on a large scale wall at Mandel Public Library, Downtown West Palm Beach. Also in 2025 he was part of the exhibit Veterans’ Visions: In Honor of the Brave with local fellow veterans at Arts Garage in Delray Beach. He possesses a strong sense of artistry and futuristic forward-thinking that is consistently displayed across all art pieces through multiple mediums to include physical and digital art. In 2021 and 2023 he created, curated and hosted The Art Brunch during Miami Art Week featuring 15 other artists in addition to his art. He was also featured in Art BAE 2022, and 2024 during Miami Art Week. He lives and works in South Florida.

Connect with Allan at @allanscanvas.

Little Traverse Bay Bands citizen.

Connect with Hadassah at @coolwatergreensky.

Born and raised in Detroit, Anthea’s love of art is a byproduct of the exposure to creative and performing artists in her family. Being exposed to various genres of science fiction, anime, fantasy and African centered stories from an early age. She found the imagery and characters of these stories exciting and it became her dream to create art that celebrates black imagery in fantasy and science fiction genres. Artist Statement: 

My work is inspired by the aesthetics and stories throughout the African diaspora. My artwork is a unique blend of traditional painting methods, manga aesthetics, sci-fi/fantasy and subject matter pertaining to the African Diaspora. I primarily use acrylic and ink to create highly detailed illustrations and paintings that draw the viewer into the subject matter. I am a recent graduate of the College for Creative Studies with a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts.My goal is to create art that not only represents people that look like me in the fantasy genre, but to create stories unique to the African diaspora.

Connect with Anthea at @plumsx_peaches.

Connect with DDDMPEG at @ddiddydotmpeg.

Curator

Within the Detroit community, Asia Hamilton advocates for women and non-binary artists of color, and in her northwest Detroit community, through her gallery and her work as a commissioner on the City of Detroit Entertainment Commission. As a native of the Crary/St Mary’s neighborhood, Asia has witnessed first-hand how revitalization efforts in Detroit have largely overlooked the northwest side. And as a woman artist of color, Asia has experienced the barriers that women of color face in gaining exposure and recognition in the art world.  These experiences inspired her founding of Norwest Gallery of Art in 2018, her creation of Womxn House at her childhood home, and her advocacy on Detroit’s Entertainment Commission. Her experiences as an accomplished international artist, a woman of color, and a longtime resident of Detroit’s northwest side make her uniquely qualified to lead this initiative. Through her work, Asia seeks to build up BIPOC womxn artists, bring exposure and investment to the community where she grew up, and make the northwest side a hub for international artistic expression and collaboration. Asia opened the Norwest Gallery of Art, a community-based contemporary art gallery focusing on African Diaspora art. Asia has participated in many community arts projects and won the 2018 and 2021 Knight Arts Challenge.

Connect with Asia at @photo.sensei.

Participating Organizations

Norwest Gallery of Art is a distinctive and exclusive space specializing in Contemporary art. Situated at the intersection of culture and opulence, our gallery is a premier destination for art enthusiasts, collectors, and connoisseurs seeking elevated and culturally resonant artistic experiences

Connect with Norwest Gallery of Art at @norwestgallery.

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a message of social change that benefits the working class. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.