Co Tour Gallery began with a question
What would it mean to create a place for looking—truly looking—here, now?
Detroit is a city shaped by movement, grit, rebuilding, and return. Our people hold intensity and kindness side by side. Within that context, Co Tour Gallery was imagined as something modest and deliberate: a space for modern and contemporary art by Detroit–based artists, set within grounds that invite stillness, pause, and reflection.
This is our first gallery. That matters to us.
Not as a declaration of newness, but as a reminder to stay attentive, open, and unhurried. We are building this space from the position of listeners—artists, neighbors, visitors—learning how a gallery might serve rather than announce itself.
The name Co Tour suggests movement together, a shared path. A walk. A return. We are interested in what happens when art is encountered at a human pace, when time is allowed to stretch, and when the environment around the work is given equal consideration.
The grounds are not incidental.
They are part of the experience of the gallery—seasonal, changing, alive. We hope viewers arrive with time to wander. We believe this kind of attention carries over, subtly, into how the work is seen.
Our focus is on artists working in and around metro Detroit—not as a boundary, but as a point of connection. These are artists shaped by this region’s histories, landscapes, and rhythms, even when their work reaches far beyond them. We are drawn to practices that reward sustained looking, that hold complexity without urgency, that ask something gentle yet demanding of the viewer.
Co Tour Gallery is not meant to be loud.
It is not meant to explain everything.
It is meant to hold space.
We are interested in exhibitions that unfold slowly, installations that consider how bodies move through rooms, and works that reveal themselves over time. We believe contemplation is not a luxury, but a necessary condition for meaningful engagement—with art, with place, and with one another.
As this gallery opens, we honor the long lineage of artists and cultural workers who have shaped Detroit through care, persistence, and imagination. We do not see ourselves as separate from that lineage, but as part of an ongoing conversation—one that values presence over performance.
This blog will serve as a quiet companion to the gallery. Here, we will share reflections on process, artist conversations, moments from installation, and observations from the grounds. Not documentation for its own sake, but glimpses into how the gallery comes into being and continues to evolve.
Upon a visit to Co Tour Gallery, we hope you leave feeling unhurried, perhaps as if loitering with angels.
We hope something lingers.
We hope you return.
Written by KALISSA MAXWELL
Kalissa Maxwell, owner of Co Tour Gallery, is a practicing artist and jewelry designer and has collected art for many years. She is a fifth-generation Detroiter with family ties to Augustus Woodward. Kalissa became rooted on the eastside when she purchased an old Baptist church built in the Greek Revival style. The church is a humble single-story wooden structure with a gabled roof.
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Kalissa Maxwell first encountered the watercolor work of Louis Redstone not through an archive or a formal introduction, but through a quiet moment of looking. At the time, Redstone was already well known in Detroit as an architect—his buildings woven into the city’s civic and cultural fabric. What was less visible, almost hidden in plain sight, was the depth of his work on paper.
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The Rediscovery of Redstone Watercolor: Architecture meets Abstract Expressionism
Kalissa Maxwell first encountered the watercolor work of Louis Redstone not through an archive or a formal introduction, but through a quiet moment of looking. At the time, Redstone was already well known in Detroit as an architect—his buildings woven into the city’s civic and cultural fabric. What was less visible, almost hidden in plain sight, was the depth of his work on paper.
Redstone’s watercolors were not studies or side notes to his architectural practice. They were complete, rigorous, and sustained. Over time, it became clear that he had devoted himself to abstraction in a way that felt both singular and unresolved in the larger historical record: a mid-century modern abstract expressionist working almost entirely in watercolor.
The Rediscovery of Redstone Watercolor: Architecture meets Abstract Expressionism
Kalissa Maxwell first encountered the watercolor work of Louis Redstone not through an archive or a formal introduction, but through a quiet moment of looking. At the time, Redstone was already well known in Detroit as an architect—his buildings woven into the city’s civic and cultural fabric. What was less visible, almost hidden in plain sight, was the depth of his work on paper.
Redstone’s watercolors were not studies or side notes to his architectural practice. They were complete, rigorous, and sustained. Over time, it became clear that he had devoted himself to abstraction in a way that felt both singular and unresolved in the larger historical record: a mid-century modern abstract expressionist working almost entirely in watercolor.
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