For Polich and Jennifer Conlin, the time and place was a Christmas party at Marina and Bob Whitman’s house. In the summer of 2010, Conlin and her husband, Daniel Rivkin, fled growing unrest in Egypt to move back to her hometown. The global journalists and their three children were living in a guest suite in the basement of her parents’ Ann Arbor home and trying to figure out their next career steps.
Conlin and a longtime friend, former New York Times reporter Dan Shaw, submitted a long-shot grant application to the Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge. Their proposal, which they called CriticCar Detroit, was to create a mobile recording studio that would invite people to “record video reviews as they exit performances and exhibitions.” To their shock, out of 233 applications, theirs was one of just three funded.
But then, Conlin says, Shaw decided he did not want to move to Detroit—­leaving her “really on my own” to turn the $100,000 grant into a real-life project. “I was like a deer in the headlights,” she recalls. “As a journalist, I didn’t know any of the ins and outs of how difficult a nonprofit is” to run.
Then, at the Whitmans’ party two years ago, Rivkin met Deb Polich—and realized that Artrain might be able to help. He told Conlin, “You need to come talk to Deb.”
Artrain was also reinventing itself. Founded in 1971, it mounted touring art exhibits in railcars. But “as time went on, the ability to move the trains through the freight system became more and more cumbersome,” says Polich, who’s run the nonprofit for twenty years. After the last tour wrapped up in 2007, the group planned a capital campaign to build new “mobile museum units” in semitrailers, “but after [the financial crash in] October of 2008 any idea of doing a major capital campaign was just not practical.” Seeing no future for the train, “we sold four of the cars to Disney,” says Polich. The final car went last January, to a scenic railway in North Carolina.
Artrain now shares its staff and NEW Center space with the county Arts Alliance and works on a variety of mobile art projects. Polich saw CriticCar fitting right in. “She said, ‘Let’s go out and have a drink,’” Conlin recalls. “It was like a therapy session.”
Conlin kept working as a freelance journalist—in 2012, the Times published her memoir of moving back home with the headline, “‘The Waltons’ Meets ‘Modern Family.’” Meanwhile, she says, Polich took on the administrative chores of getting the CriticCar project off the ground.
“I just don’t know what I would have done without her,” says Conlin. “All I had to do was go to Detroit, be on the street with the people, getting my message out, which is to get these voices of these people in Detroit out.”
In December, CriticCar was awarded a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. As far as a permanent funding model goes, “we’re not there yet,” says Polich. “We’re working on it.”
Meanwhile, Conlin is thinking about a smartphone app that will take the be-your-own-critic idea “to a whole new level—people being able to record their own reviews, using our technology to create mini-reels. You could interview friends listening to a band or visiting a museum.”
They’re also talking about expanding CriticCar to other cities. “For instance, we’re thinking it would be fun to try it in Ann Arbor,” says Conlin. “I could see that that would be the next place to try it.”