Halima Afi Cassells, founder of The Free Market of Detroit, is an award-winning interdisciplinary community-engaged artist, mom, avid gardener, and organizer with deep roots in Waawiiyaataanong/Detroit. Cassells' parents photographed her unsolicited murals and fashions as a kid, encouraging her exploration. Community is the heart of her work. She credits gardening as inspiring her move away from painting to a practice where she aspires to use natural, found, and up-cycled materials and processes that lend to the thriving of all (human and non-human) communities. Cassells continues to explore relationship-building and the notions of freedom and work, value and disposability in a participatory context through projects like The Free Market of Detroit, Traveling Indigo Vat, and her Tables and Thrones series.

Awarded the 2023 Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship for interdisciplinary art, she continually dives down rabbit holes seeking to understand the interconnectedness of systems and self. A self-guided student of anthropology, macroeconomics, British imperialism and common law, global corporatism, climate crisis, and psychology, she uses her art with the intent of returning to a "right relationship." As an advocate for artists and cultural practitioners, she has spearheaded many community processes that uplift cultural capital from often-exploited communities and creates in a collaborative context. In addition to Detroit, her work has been featured in spaces in New York, Oakland, Oaxaca, Berlin, Copenhagen, Bogota, and Harare.

The Free Market of Detroit is a decade-long experiment at the intersection of sustainable fashion, spontaneous art-making, Indigenous economic practices, and community building. Part thrift store, part art studio, and part community space, The Free Market of Detroit provides clothes, accessories, and household items for free and invites participants to engage in a range of classes, workshops, and skill-shares that center textile arts, including hand dyeing, screen printing, sewing and alterations, jewelry making, basic repair, and more.