DETROIT – Sept 10, 2013 – Through a month-long text to vote campaign, Detroiters picked Hamtramck’s LO & BEHOLD! Records and Books as the winner of the Knight Arts Challenge People’s Choice Award. 

The store, owned by Richard Wohlfeil, will receive a $20,000 prize. The award was announced Tuesday night at a celebration event for the 56 winners of the Knight Arts Challenge, a community-wide contest funding projects that engage and enrich Detroit through the arts.

“There is a lot of passion in Detroit for LO & BEHOLD!, and that showed in the People’s Choice Award voting,,” said Dennis Scholl, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s vice president for arts.  

Knight Foundation launched the People’s Choice Award to highlight the work of small and up-and-coming arts organizations in Metro Detroit.

When asked why LO & BEHOLD should win the award, owner Wohlfeil wrote this summer:“This small shop, that is our storefront and the books and music we’ve printed and published for people over the past few years, began with nothing. We’ve never had a start-up business loan, a public or private grant, nor a strong enough economy in our city to bring in enough customers needed to keep a place like LO & BEHOLD! financially alive…However, our neighbors remain so rich in spirit and give so much strength and love to the art, music and literature this place creates and provides, that I continue to wear myself down, working odd jobs before and after shop hours and donating my personal record and book collection to the shop to keep up on bills. … Seeing a positive, physical change in our community is what gives me the strength to keep going.”

The store can use the grant for an arts project of its choosing. In addition, this week the store won a $30,000 grant through the Knight Arts Challenge, one of the 56 projects that received a total of $2.1 million. The store will use those funds to document its monthly Folk Blues Night performances. The intimate, acoustic event is hosted by two local folk blues musicians and is recorded using vintage ribbon microphones, as an early blues session might have been recorded in the 1930s and ’40s. With challenge funding, the store will release recordings as a series of LPs, with booklets providing the history of the songs and information on the musicians.

The four other nominees for the People’s Choice Award included artist collective Complex Movements, bike design group East Side Riders, the Mt Elliot Makerspace and the monthly storytelling event Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers.

To learn more about the nominees, visit knightarts.org/peopleschoice

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

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Contacts:

Andrew Sherry, Vice President/Communications, (305) 908-2677, [email protected]