The annual Student Exhibition at the College for Creative Studies transforms the college into a massive gallery space each spring. It showcases work from emerging artists and designers across disciplines ranging from illustration and product design to textiles, automotive design, and fine arts.
This year marks the 101st annual CCS Student Exhibition. It features more than 4,800 pieces of art and design on display. Opening night drew over 3,200 attendees to campus, and the exhibition remains free and open to the public through May 29. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience the depth of creative work happening inside CCS studios and classrooms.
Beyond the finished pieces themselves, the exhibition highlights something equally important: process.
“The great work always rises to the top,” said Don Kilpatrick III, professor and chair of the Illustration Department at CCS. “What you’re seeing in the show is the culmination of everything students have been working on throughout the year.”
How Pieces Are Chosen for the CCS Student Exhibition
According to Kilpatrick III, every piece shown goes through a faculty jurying process, where instructors review student work from annual critiques and select projects that best represent the strength and diversity of the college’s programs.
“We really stress iteration,” he explained. “It’s much like the scientific method. You test ideas, refine them, rethink them, and continue building until the work becomes what it needs to be.”
That emphasis on experimentation and revision is visible throughout the exhibition floor.
For illustration senior Reden Lee, one featured project shifted dramatically after she abandoned an earlier direction. Initially focused on a more realistic sports illustration, Lee ultimately scrapped dozens of early concepts after feedback from professors. Here professors encouraged her to lean further into her own visual voice.
“I made around 30 thumbnails and none of them felt right,” Lee said. “My teachers told me to make something that felt more like me.”
The final piece became a densely detailed, energetic composition filled with layered scenes and characters designed to reward repeat viewing. Lee described wanting audiences to continually discover new moments within the work.
“I love that feeling where you look at the poster and notice something different every time,” she said. “I wanted people who didn’t even know much about the event to still feel excited by it.”
Combining the Creative and the Analytical
The exhibition also highlights how students merge creativity with research-driven problem solving and systems thinking.
Greg Darby, department chair and associate professor of product and industrial design, said contemporary design education increasingly requires students to think beyond aesthetics alone, combining innovation, usability, sustainability, and human-centered thinking.
That philosophy is reflected in the work of product design junior Kolin Baker.
One of Baker’s projects, Bee Bot, imagines a robotic educational companion designed to help young children safely learn boundaries and empathy through interactions that mimic caring for a pet. The concept was inspired by observing how children often first learn emotional and physical boundaries through animals.
“If you shake it, it gets upset,” Baker explained. “The idea is that the child forms a relationship with it, but without the risks that can happen with a real animal.”
Getting Personal
Another project explored medical design through a conceptual ultrasonic vein locator intended to help healthcare workers improve IV accuracy using 3D ultrasound technology and AI-assisted guidance.
Baker said both projects were shaped by lived experience and extensive research, including robotics feasibility studies, battery limitations, medical journals, and healthcare accessibility gaps.
“I think it puts extra love into the project when you have a personal connection to it,” Baker said.
That connection between personal narrative and material experimentation is also central to the work of Studio Art and Craft senior Riley Klein, whose woven textile pieces blend fine art, pattern design, and storytelling.
Klein’s work builds on years of experience with sewing and weaving originally learning from her grandmother. Eventually, she evolved into working on large-scale tapestries influenced by fairy tales, feminism, photography, and personal memory. Some pieces require between 50 and 100 hours of weaving alone.
“It’s taught me a lot about patience and focus,” Klein said. “You know what you want the work to become, and you just keep showing up for it.”
For MFA senior Gabrielle Paulina-Hamill, process begins with research into landscapes, sustainability, consumer behavior, and computational design systems.
Her graduate-level color and materials design projects explored regenerative landscaping concepts and luxury automotive interiors using biodegradable materials, computational pattern generation, and topographic data drawn from California’s Pinnacles National Park.
“I’m really interested in computational design and parametric patterns,” Paulina-Hamill said. “I love combining technical workflows with material experimentation.”
When CCS and Detroit Collide
Across disciplines, students repeatedly described CCS as a place where creative risk-taking is encouraged. Faculty mentorship plays a major role in helping them discover their voice.
“You can see students turning corners creatively,” Kilpatrick III said. “That process isn’t always comfortable, but that’s where growth happens.”
He also emphasized the connection between CCS and Detroit’s broader creative ecosystem, noting that many graduates continue building careers within the city after graduation.
“The students are contributing to Detroit’s creative identity,” Kilpatrick III said. “Their murals, designs, films, illustrations, they become part of the city itself.”
As visitors move through the exhibition, they are not only seeing completed artwork, but also the culmination of years of experimentation, revision, technical learning, and personal growth.
For CCS President Donald Tuski, that emphasis on “making” has defined the school since its founding in 1906 as the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts.
“We historically have been really good on creative careers,” Tuski said. “But it’s also about great art and craft and making and design.”
The CCS Student Exhibition remains free and open to the public through May 29. Complete details are available at ccsdetroit.edu.
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