The Scarab Club: Detroit's Artist Society Since 1907 and the Lounge Where Diego Rivera Signed the Beam

A group of Detroit painters and illustrators founded the Hopkin Club in 1907, named for the late James Hopkin, a local landscape painter who had taught half the men in the room. They renamed it the Scarab Club in 1910 after the Egyptian beetle the ancients took for a symbol of rebirth, a fair claim for a city already remaking itself around the assembly line. For two decades the group rented space, drifted between studios, and held figure-drawing sessions wherever a stove and a model could be persuaded into the same room. In 1928 they finally built a clubhouse of their own at 217 Farnsworth Street in Midtown, behind the Detroit Institute of Arts, and have not moved since.

The architect was Lancelot Sukert, a Detroit native born in 1888 who had studied at the University of California, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania before going to France during the First World War as a Signal Corps lieutenant building aerodromes near the front. He came home, worked two years for Albert Kahn, and opened his own office. By the time the Scarab Club commission arrived he had designed St. Columba, Boulevard Congregational, St. Cyprian, and St. Paul's Memorial Church. He was thirty-nine. The clubhouse on Farnsworth is the building everyone remembers him for.

A romantic three-story brick box behind the DIA

Sukert built a three-story brick volume in a vaguely Romanesque manner, with arched windows on the second floor, a parapet roofline, and a recessed entry framed in stone. Over the door he set a Pewabic tile panel of the club's namesake scarab, glazed in Mary Chase Stratton's famous iridescent blue-green. The west party wall, exposed after a neighboring building came down, became a mural surface that the club has used for outdoor commissions ever since.

The interior follows the lodge plan favored by Arts and Crafts clubs: a ground-floor gallery for exhibitions, a second-floor lounge with a fireplace and a long beam across the ceiling, and a top-floor studio under a north-light skylight. The lounge beam is the famous one. Visiting artists who pass through sign their names on it. Diego Rivera signed during his 1932 Detroit residency, when he was painting the Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts next door.

The club, the city, and the photographs

The Scarab Club still runs as an artist society. It hosts gallery shows, life-drawing sessions, and an annual silver-medal exhibition. The building is open to the public on weekdays and on event nights, and it is one of the more atmospheric portrait locations in Midtown.

If you want to photograph at the Scarab Club, see our portrait photography page or book a session. Permits for commercial photography go through the club's executive director.