Guitarist/composer A. Spencer Barefield has received numerous grants for compositions from ArtServe Michigan-MCACA, Meet-the-Composer/NEA Commission USA, Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest, National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for Arts, Arts Midwest and others.

He has toured and recorded in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, extensively as a leader, soloist, and with Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, Richard Davis and others. Barefield’s recordings “Live Detroit” and “Xenogenesis 2000” (CAC label), and his Sound Aspects (Germany) releases “After the End” and “Live at Leverkusen” have received rave international reviews and honors, including best new release in Cadence Critics’ Poll, Jazz Times (guitar issue), Metro Times Music Awards and others.

He is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Creative Arts Collective (CAC), whose concerts at the Detroit Institute of Arts and elsewhere earned CAC the Michigan’s Governor’s Arts Award for excellence and international recognition for its innovative presentations. Over a hundred of CAC’s concerts have been broadcast on National Public Radio. Barefield has taught guitar and improvisation at the University of Michigan School of Music and elsewhere.

For 28 years, the Creative Arts Collective, a 501 (C)(3) nonprofit organization, has been committed to presenting the best of cutting-edge jazz and creative music in Detroit and throughout the world. This event promise to continue this tradition.

A prominent feature of the 1927 Detroit Institute of Arts building is the 1200 seat auditorium, designed by Paul Philippe Cret as a venue for film, lectures and live performances. Now regarded as one of the most important architects of large-scale American civil engineering projects during the early 20th century, Cret was fluent in both modern as well as neoclassic styles. He was also a pioneering industrial designer, whose visionary Burlington Pioneer Zephyr streamliner locomotive is now on permanent display inside the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. For the DIA Auditorium Cret collaborated with Detroit architect C. Howard Crane, designer of several lavish Detroit theatres of the 1920s such as Detroit's Fox Theatre. The auditorium combines Cret's elegant sense of space and occasion with Crane's theater engineering sophistication. Innovative elements of the auditorium include ceiling and walls that were designed around the extensive classical pipe organ built by Casavant Freres of Montreal. The mezzanine level Crystal Gallery reception space features a two-story, vaulted gallery with floor to ceiling crystal reflecting walls on either end. Many decorative elements, such as the wrought iron interior grilles by Samuel Yellin and colorful fountains and terra-cotta tiles along the staircase from Detroit's Pewabic Pottery, represent the highest level of American craftsmanship from the era.