SWFest highlights Detroit creatives with inaugural festival

Xavier Cuevas

The inaugural SWFest will be at Senate Theater and will have a variety of performances including Curtis Roach, Tiny Jag and Gabriel Duran.

Senate Theater will be transformed into a music and art festival as the inaugural SWFest takes place at the Southwest Detroit theater this weekend.

With 32 performances across three different stages, the inaugural festival will showcase local Detroit artists and creatives, including Tiny Jag, Curtis Roach, Uribi and Generacion 3. There will also be a variety of vendors, family-friendly fun, and onsite COVID-19 vaccination and HIV testing clinics.

“We just wanted to put on a large-scale music festival in Southwest Detroit that would allow us to highlight local artists, Black vendors, young entrepreneurs, young creatives, those early startups, and also provide resources all in the same place and have it be a free event so that the whole neighborhood can come out and just be accessible to everybody,” said singer-songwriter Gabriel Duran, a Southwest Detroit native and one of the festival’s organizers.

Performances will be on three stages; two outdoor stages, the Coney Stage and the Community stage, with the main stage inside Senate Theater.

Duran says the performances on the Coney Stage will cater more toward young adults, while the Community Stage will appeal to families and a younger demographic as most of the vendors will be at the Community Stage. There will also be an art installation inside the Senate Theater.

“Our main goal as a collective is to highlight how powerful organizing within a community can be and to show people that this is somewhat of a model that we can bring our team together,” said Duran.