Popps Packing is excited to welcome our May Artist in Residence, Paul Freudenburg (Hamden, Connecticut).
Paul found painting through his study of architecture during his undergraduate years at Yale College. A studio mate invited him to join a painting and drawing summer program in Auvillar, France, led by the late Robert Reed. Reed’s intensive teaching method introduced Paul to the communicative power of visual syntax and helped shape a rigorous, independent painting practice.
Paul later returned to Yale for a dual-degree program in Architecture and Environmental Studies, where he expanded his creative work through research, world-building, and precedent-based practice. Following graduation, he spent three years teaching as part of Yale’s Jim Vlock Building Project, an immersive design-build program in New Haven, CT.
Throughout May, Paul will continue work begun in his paintings Curtain Still Life #1 and Shade is a Projection.
Stay tuned for details on an Open Studio with Paul at the end of May.
Pleas join us for an Open studio BBQ on Thursday April 23rd. From 6-8pm and meet our current Artist in Residence @wlsagestudio and learn more about her ongoing series of acrylic ink drawings, Portraits of Home, which engages with past and present residents of the cities of Detroit and Highland Park to document their homes and neighborhoods through collaboration and exchange.
Whitney is looking for participation from past and present residents of Detroit and Highland Park to add their past or present homes to the project and to potentially add their personal/communal histories to a new oral history component in development. Participants who contribute an address to the project will receive a signed, editioned giclee art print of the finished work. Join us at Popps Packing, 12138 Saint Aubin St., Hamtramck, MI
8124 East McNichols Road
"I lived in this home from my birth in 1956 until I was almost five years old. My grandmother's brother built it for her and her family.
My parents married in 1955 and they rented the upper floor of this house until we moved to our own home. This house was unique in having an ante-room and a swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. The curtains and the wall paper had the same pattern and it was terribly cold in winters.
The house was on a busy street near a large cemetery and a block from the end of the runway of Coleman Young Airport. To this day, the sound of slow hum and low flying planes makes me recall those days, Sunday dinners and sleep-overs."
Popps Packing is excited to welcome Whitney Lea Sage @wlsagestudio to the Popps Packing residency for the month of April. During her time at Popps, Whitney will be working on her ongoing series of acrylic ink drawings, Portraits of Home, which engages with past and present residents of the cities of Detroit and Highland Park to document their homes and neighborhoods through collaboration and exchange.
Whitney is looking for participation from past and present residents of Detroit and Highland Park to add their past or present homes to the project and to potentially add their personal/communal histories to a new oral history component in development. Participants who contribute an address to the project will receive a signed, editioned giclee art print of the finished work.
There are two ways you can get involved in the project:
o Fill out a google form (via @wlsagestudio bio) with some information about you or a past/present home you have a connection to.
o Meet the artist in person at Popp’s during any of the following open studio hours
OPEN STUDIO HOURS WITH WHITNEY:
Dates: April 21-23 from 12–5 pm
Location: Popps Packing, 12138 Saint Aubin St., Hamtramck, MI
Community involvement wanted!
I'm excited to be in residence @poppspacking program during April 2026. During my time at Popps, I will be working on my ongoing series of ink drawings, Portraits of Home, which engages with past and present residents of the cities of Detroit and Highland Park to document their homes and neighborhoods through collaboration and exchange.
I'm looking for participation from past and present residents of Detroit and Highland Park to add their past or present homes to the project and to potentially add their personal/communal histories to a new oral history component in development. Participants who contribute an address to the project will receive a signed, editioned giclee art print of the finished work.
There are two ways you can get involved in the project:
o Fill out the google form (linked in my bio) with some information about you or a past/present home you have a connection to.
o Meet me, the artist, in-person at Popp’s during any of the following open studio hours:
OPEN STUDIO HOURS WITH WHITNEY:
Dates: April 16, April 21-23 from 12–5 pm
Location: Popps Packing, 12138 Saint Aubin St., Hamtramck, MI
Please share and message me with any questions you have about getting involved!
Thank you @ceramicnoodles for putting on such a wonderful show@and@for@all your hard work and grace. Thank you to everyone who came through during @nceca . It was so rejuvenating to have Popps full of so much art and people.
Join us for an open studio event with our Spring Resident Artist Josue Bessiake.
Thursday, March 26, 2026 ,5PM-8PM
Josue Bessiake is an Ivorian-American painter working across media. Bessiake employs multiple disciplines to investigate the ingredients of a phenomenon. Influenced by his experience as a second-generation immigrant and itinerant upbringing, his work reflects his desire to connect with his environment.
At the core of Josue Bessiake’s practice is his interested in the structure of things; treating his studio like a living laboratory in a process that involves using repurposed materials, destruction, and repair.
During his residency at Popps Packing Bessiake is expanding on themes from an ongoing project The Anatomy of a Home, using found and recycled material to make paintings that explore the particular light from domestic windows around Detroit and Hamtramck.
Josue Bessiake has presented work at the National Gallery of the Bahamas, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, and the Charles Wright Museum. Recent Exhibitions include exhibits at The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, New York Academy of Art, and The Institute for Public Architecture on Governor’s Island, NY. Bessiake was a recent finalist for the AXA Art Prize at the New York Academy of Art and a grant recipient from the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation.
In 2016 I went to Detroit for an artist-in-residence. That’s where the seed was planted for me to start working with light objects, combined with paint — as a new carrier for paint, a luminous painting.
Detroit is filled with large advertising billboard columns, many of them half broken. I was drawn to this layered reality: the polished surface of advertisement merging with the rawness behind it, where the fluorescent tubes that illuminate the image unexpectedly become part of the image itself.
This experience shifted my way of seeing and making. Light became more than illumination—it became material, something to paint with and through, expanding the possibilities of the canvas.
Grateful to Popps Packing for the AIR opportunity that sparked this direction. @poppspacking #detroit #mondriaanfonds @mondriaanfonds
OPEN CALL: 2026 Artist Residenciese (July- September and beyond)
Popps Packing is accepting applications for 1–3 month residencies taking place July 2026 and beyond.
Who can apply
Emerging, mid-career, and established visual artists working in all studio-based practices.
Residency details
• 4,500 sq/ft warehouse with shared studios and living space, private bedrooms.
• Two artists in residence at a time
Accommodations & fees
• Individuals: $850–$1,000/month (private bedroom)
• Collaboratives / families / collectives: $1,800/month (two bedrooms + exclusive studio)
All residencies include utilities, internet, laundry, workshops, gardens, mobile sauna, and outdoor project space.
Application deadline: deadline for summer residencies ( July - September) April15, 2026. All other inquiries are ongoing.
Apply + full details: poppspacking.org
Questions: [email protected]
#OpenCall #ArtistResidency #PoppsPacking #DetroitArtists #Hamtramck ResidencyDeadline VisualArtists
Popps Packing is excited to welcome Josue Bessiake to our studio residency program for the month of March.
Bessiake is an Ivorian-American painter working across media currently based out of New York.
Influenced by his experience as a second-generation immigrant and itinerant upbringing, his work reflects his desire to connect with his environment. In a process involving repurposed material, disassembly, and repair, Bessiake’s work is a
collision between the known and unknown, using the methods of painting to fabricate forms, wooden supports, or found objects, making references to scale, memory and collective consciousness.
Josue Bessiake has presented work at the National Gallery of the Bahamas, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, and the Charles Wright Museum. Recent Exhibitions include exhibits at The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, New York Academy of Art, and The Institute for Public Architecture on Governor’s Island, NY.
Stay tuned for his Open Studio Event at the end of the month. Welcome Josue!
Popps Packing is excited to host Fragments and Familiar Things curated by Zena Segre as part of the NCECA 2026 Conference in Detroit.
Reception: Thursday March 26, 5-8pm
Hours: March 16-23 (by appointment: email [email protected] to schedule)
Mar 24-29: Open Hours (no appointment needed) 10:00AM–5:00PM
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 work by Ashwini Bhat, Salvador Jimenez Flores, Marie Herwald Hermann, Del Harrow, Liz McCarthy, August S. Lantz, Chris Salas, Dove Hornbuckle, Saffronia Downing, Ashley Lyon, Ling Chun, Luka Carter, Virginia Torrence, Nathan Tonning, and others.
At Ox-Bow clay acts as conduit. A record of touch, transformation, and time. Some works emanate sincerity, others shimmer with silliness or quiet resistance. Together, they propose a map: part archive, part speculative compost heap, where new and old collide in curious and fertile forms. Inspired by the poetics of rock collecting—of platelets and pulp, of grains of sand carried home in pant cuffs and pockets— this exhibition approaches the object as roaming portal: vessels of memory, growth, and the teachings of an expansive and evolving network.
Reception: Thursday March 26, 5-8pm
Hours: March 24-29: 10:00AM–5:00PM
Poster image by @_saffr0nia_
