When Marvin Foreman’s friend told him earlier this year about an arts center in Midtown dedicated to senior citizens, he decided to check it out. 

“She knew I was into art,” Foreman said. “The classes were inexpensive, like $9 for 15 weeks. I was like, ‘What? I’ll do two.’” 

The 68-year-old Detroiter began taking classes at the Hannan Center in May, meeting other artists and learning new art styles. Five months later, two of Foreman’s works are part of the center’s annual art exhibition. 

The Hannan Center this month opened its 2025 Emerge! Art Festival, a juried show of visual art and performance by older adult artists. Overall, there are 98 artists and 175 artworks featured from emerging and established metro Detroit artists aged 55 and older, the center’s Arts and Culture Director, Richard Reeves, told BridgeDetroit. The mediums include sculptures, pottery, fiber art and more. The show runs until Jan. 14 inside the center’s Ellen Kayrod Gallery, 4750 Woodward Ave. 

This year’s theme, “100 Years Unbound: The Power of Aging,” coincides with the organization’s 100th anniversary. In addition to the art festival, the Hannan Center opened an exhibit this month at the Detroit Historical Museum, also titled “100 Years Unbound.” The show, on display through Jan. 20, tells the story of the organization’s history through rare artifacts, photographs and art. 

The center recently held a 100th anniversary celebration and will host its 70 Over Seventy Awards on Saturday. The awards will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Atheneum Suite Hotel in Greektown, honoring 70 people ages 70 and older who are making a difference in their community. 

Hannan Center President and CEO Vincent Tilford said a book on the organization’s history in the 1920s and 1930s helped him plan the centennial celebration, as well as the two exhibits. 

“More than anything, I want Detroiters to value older people, and I wanted to use our 100th anniversary celebration to showcase and highlight the value that older people bring,” he said. 

One of those people is Foreman. His two festival pieces are “Black Women Pride,” featuring the face of a woman on a blackboard drawn in white pencil and “The New Alphabets,” which depicts two women holding hands done in oil pastels. 

Foreman said he wants to show inclusion in his artwork, which is reflective of the friends he has of different races and backgrounds. 

“I got friends that are Black, white, Puerto Rican who speak Spanish, English, German, Russian,” he said. “Don’t make no difference. It’s a universal spirit. They’re all doing the best with the hand they were dealt with.” 

The artist said it’s a privilege to receive attention for his work and to be featured in the exhibition. 

“I’m the new kid on the block,” Foreman said. “It’s almost like being a kid and all this new stuff I’m being exposed to. It’s exciting.” 

The history of Hannan 

The blueprint for the Hannan Center began in 1917 when real estate mogul William Hannan died, leaving his estate to his wife, Luella Hannan, according to the center’s website. On Sept. 12, 1925, Luella Hannan established the Luella Hannan Memorial Home trust fund with the intention of building and maintaining a home for seniors in Detroit. After that $5 million project failed, Luella Hannan instead directed her trustees to use the income from the fund to support people in their homes. 

Luella Hannan died in 1928 following a long illness, reported the Detroit Free Press. Three years later, the John Scudder Foundation for Old People was created as a bequest by wealthy Detroit manufacturer John Scudder. The mission of the foundation was to care for seniors without familial and financial support.

In 1971, the John Scudder Foundation and Luella Hannan Memorial Home, then known as the Luella Hannan Memorial Foundation, merged. The philanthropist’s wish finally came true later that year when a four-story, 45,000-square-foot senior home was built on Woodward Avenue and Hancock called Hannan House. 

As more subsidized housing was constructed in the area, Hannan House transitioned into a senior center in 1993. In 2017, a nonprofit separate from the foundation, called Hannan Center, was established to focus on providing programming and services to seniors in metro Detroit. 

A concept ahead of its time

Billy Wall-Winkle, a field curator for the Detroit Historical Museum, said he had the challenge of taking 100 years of history and reducing it to about 1,400 words for the exhibit. 

“It was a lot of background research, it was a lot of looking at what Hannan had on hand, what local institutions had on hand and just piecing it out from there,” he said. 

Some of the artifacts and art on display include a Luella Hannan Memorial Home remembrance booklet from 1930, a painting from the 1990s that reads “Hannan House” over a tree, and a large rectangle of fabric filled with flowers titled “Hannan Center Memorial Garden.” Visitors can share memories of a loved one by writing them down on paper leaves that will be added to the memorial garden when the exhibit closes, Wall-Winkle said. 

The curator added that Luella Hannan was a trendsetter. Caring about the well-being of seniors was something not many people were thinking about in the early 20th century. 

“You didn’t have widespread support through retirement, you didn’t have the ability to build savings,” Wall-Winkle said. “You worked and worked and when you couldn’t work anymore, you were kind of chucked aside. And what we wanted to do is show how the pioneering work of the Luella Hannon and John Scudder foundations demonstrated the importance of caring for the elderly, giving them dignity and demonstrating that the value of a person doesn’t end on how productive they are. I hope we’ve done that.” 

Tilford also believes Hannan was ahead of her time, creating a safety net for seniors years before programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid existed. 

“We were basically the social safety net 10 years before Social Security was created, 40 years before Medicare and Medicaid were created,” he said. “Luella Hannan’s initial idea was that we would construct a facility where seniors could live and not have to worry about where their food was going to come from. For seniors who qualified, who came to our doors, we would provide them essentially a lifetime pension.”

A second act  

Since Gayle Watson started taking classes at the Hannan Center in 2013, new opportunities have opened up for the 75-year-old. The former senior manager for AT&T is now enjoying a second act as an artist, appearing in exhibits at the Detroit Institute of Arts and invited by the museum to host demonstrations on notan art, a Japanese concept that involves the placement of high contrast elements to create balanced light and dark areas in a composition.

“The only art I had before (Hannan) was in elementary school. I’ve always loved art,” Watson said. 

For the Emerge exhibit, Watson submitted two pieces: “Keeping Company” and “Keeping Company 2.” Both works feature an older couple embracing, with the first featuring orange, green, blue and brown painted tiles and the second done in ink. Watson said the pieces show that even though the couple is older, they’re still enjoying their lives. 

“It depicts that there is life, even when you mature,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that this society has such a focus on youth, it’s almost as if they forget that there is a generation also known as the Boomers that do exist and are very active and involved with life.” 

Tilford hopes younger Detroiters embrace the older people in their lives and realize that seniors enjoy being around people of all ages, not just other seniors. 

“What I really hope they learn is that we shouldn’t be necessarily pitting generations against generations,” he said. “There’s this assumption that older people only want to be around older people, and that’s not true. One of the things I hope other generations get out of this is there’s a value in us intermingling, having relationships with people of all ages, because there’s a difference between someone who is 60, 80, and 100.” 

Reeves, the arts and culture director, said one of the reasons why he enjoys working at the Hannan Center is that he gets to help promote the organization’s vision of supporting and assisting the aging population. 

“Not many organizations are around for 100 years and it’s verification that we are doing something right,” he said. “A lot of times, people say the Hannan Center is one of the best, well-kept secrets, but I think that it’s only going to get better as more people know who we are. Having this 100th anniversary celebration is a way for us to tell people who we are and why we’ve been here for so long.”