The Detroit Museum of Arts Confronts Art History While Shaping Its Future 

“We have not yet begun to utilize the museum as an instrument of cultural education.” Those words, from Alain Locke’s 1925 essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” carry visitors through a set of newly installed permanent collection galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA).  
 
When he penned that text a century ago, Locke, the eminent philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, spoke on what he viewed as the popular distortion of “the African spirit,” a caricature, he argued, that obscured the true character of its descendent: African American artistic expression. He characterized this creative temperament as “free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental and human” and shaped by African Americans’ “particular experience in America and the emotional upheaval of its trials and ordeals.”  
 
In 1925, Jim Crow laws, while most prevalent in the South, had seeped into every aspect of American culture, including its art history. The museum of Locke’s imagination becomes an instrument of repair: correcting misread contexts; releasing cultures from stagnant encyclopedic silos; and insisting that even artists working in ancient traditions be recognized as citizens of the future. Left unevolved, the museum only bolsters an architecture of exclusion, one that dictates whose stories are told—and how.  
 
This fall, the Detroit Institute of Arts gestured toward Locke’s ambitious vision of the potential of museums with its reinstalled African American galleries. They have been relocated from the back of the museum to an unmissable spot beside Diego Rivera’s iconic Detroit Industry Murals (1932–33). Complementing this display is “Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuum” (through April 5), the first comprehensive survey of art from the Indigenous inhabitants of the Great Lakes region.  
 
“It’s part of our DNA, our internal philosophy that we are always looking for different perspectives,” Salvador Salort-Pons, the museum’s director since 2015, told ARTnews during a recent visit. Among the shows he has ushered in was last year’s “The Art of Dining,” a visual exploration of food culture in the Islamic world—a nod to Dearborn, Michigan’s prominent Arab American community.  
 
Yet between the DIA and the local audience it desires to draw into its galleries lies a great deal of history. Established by local titans of industry in 1885, the DIA boasts one of the country’s most esteemed art collections, but as the city’s prominence waned over decades, so too did the museum’s. Detroit itself is now amid a polarizing revitalization, which began roughly in the early aughts and accelerated after the city’s 2013 bankruptcy. Part of this change has to do with acknowledging Detroit’s history, which includes “informal but enforced” segregation practices that discouraged Black Detroiters from shaping cultural spaces in the 20th century, and the fact it sits on the unceded homelands of the Anishinaabe, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi people.   
 
But first, the DIA needs to get Detroiters through the door.  

The DIA was among the first museums anywhere to build and exhibit a collection of African American art, which it began in 1943. In 2001 it became the first US museum to name a curator devoted to that field in Valerie J. Mercer, who still serves as the museum’s curator and head of African American art.  
 
The collection she’s helped amass is undeniably extraordinary and now numbers roughly 700 works spanning painting, print, sculpture, and functional arts, like Thomas Day’s wood and black horsehair Sofa (ca. 1840). This handsome object, pristinely preserved, is one of Day’s few surviving designs in public hands. 
 
“When I came [to the DIA] not much of the African American collection was on view,” Mercer said. “That was the reason for establishing the center. The museum wanted African Americans to feel that this was their museum as well—that they were seen by it.”

The four reinstalled galleries, officially titled “Reimagine African American Art,” chart two centuries of Black artistic achievement, starting in the mid-19th century when landscape painter Robert S. Duncan and sculptor Edmonia Lewis carved out places in the professional art world. The exhibition continues into the 20th century, looking at the Great Migration and its cultural afterlife; the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ’30s; and the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements in the postwar era. The exhibition also looks at Black artists who left the US for Europe, finding that continent a more hospitable place to grow. Together, these galleries form a visual record that shows “history is not the past. It is the present,” as James Baldwin once put it. (His words are also reproduced on one gallery wall.)  
 
“With these galleries, I wanted to be able to tell a history of African American art. To me, African American art is the missing link from American art, as much as its true for other cultures in America,” said Mercer. “I mean, I never learned African American history, my education is very Eurocentric. History helps people anchor artworks; it helps them make some kind of sense.” 
 
That history includes how these artists persisted in making their art. Take Charles McGee (1924–2021), the South Carolina–born painter who became one of Detroit’s greats. When McGee was 10 years old, his grandparents made the Herculean bet that life up North would be better than the share-cropping system of the post-Reconstruction South. They joined the Great Migration—the largest, fastest internal ethnic movement in US history. McGee would go on to paint works like Spectral Rhythms (ca. early 1970s), an epic Color Field abstraction in which vast, luminous music notes drift toward an alien horizon. 

And Great Migration stories like those of McGee and his family are also visually represented in the exhibition. Hughie Lee-Smith’s The Piper (1953), for example, shows a child playing his music with only a crumbling brick wall for company. “It’s more than a picture of a boy playing a recorder,” Mercer said. “It’s about the alienation and the hope African Americans carried when they moved from the South to the North. The North wasn’t paved in gold—they found a new set of problems. That boy embodies all of it.”  

While the DIA’s reinstalled African American galleries follow a more conventional approach to their display, opting to display work chronologically, the museum hits its stride in the presentation of work by Lewis, who is not only shown in these galleries but in “Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuum.” Born in 1844, she was a sculptor of African American and Native American (Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage who depicted people of color in a neoclassical style that was on its way out at the time—but which now reads as uncannily ahead of the figurative revival of the 2010s. On view here is a stately portrait of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader, and an even more scintillating bust of Hiawatha, the protagonist of Henry Wadsworth’s 1855 epochal poem. Placing her in varied contexts isn’t just a curatorial gesture; it’s an affirmation of the cultural crossings that make up the fabric of the United States—a reminder that museums can choose to tell complex stories of race and migration.   
 
Denene De Quintal, the museum’s first curator of Native American art in decades, organized “Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuum” with the same insistence that Indigenous art is not an aesthetic monolith.  
 
“There’s a lot of work to do to bring [the museum] up to best practices for exhibiting Native American art in an institution and part of that was providing information about the community and its diaspora,” De Quintal said. She worked with an Anishinaabe advisory group to shape the presentation—a rarity for both the DIA, which hadn’t staged an exhibition of Indigenous art of comparable scale in 30 years, and for any major museum, which, in her words, “are used to having authority,” over their curation, to the detriment of how this art history is investigated. 
 
In the exhibition, more than 60 artists rebuff the popular imagination of Native art, and accordingly, visitors will find no stylized teepees, Plains bison, pine-peaked mountains there, or natural history museum–esque crowded glass cases. The gallery walls—painted deep blue and flecked with white to mimic the night sky or moonlight hitting water—echo that sentiment: the Anishinaabe belong to the Great Lakes, and the lakes to them.  

The art on view is as varied as the artists. David Dominic Jr. (Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians)’s photograph of Detroit legend Iggy Pop is paired with the Punk Rockers Nancy and Andy (1989), a dense acrylic painting by the late Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation) that is unlike the cosmological canvases for which he is better recognized. Nearby is Jonathon Thunder (Red Lake Band of Ojibwe)’s 15-foot-wide, magenta-hued painting Basil’s Dream (2024), in which Thunderbird, a powerful guardian spirit, plays pool with Mishipeshu, a panther-like spirit, while a DJ, channeling here the spirit of Digital Underground, spins records nearby. The work is an ode to Anishinaabe storyteller Basil Johnston, who sits at a typewriter to the left of the billiards table.      
 
“[Thunder] put in one conversation the many influences that Native American artists have, not just from their own culture and background,” De Quintal said, adding, “It’s Native American, African American, Latinx—this painting speaks to having multiple perspectives from diverse world viewpoints.” 
 
The expertise of the Anishinaabe advisory group shines through in the diversity of objects on view, from Dennis Esquivel’s stunning cabinet of maple and cherry wood titled Out of the Woodlands (2019), which has Ottawa war clubs for legs, to Jillian Waterman’s In Case of Emergency Bury Me and Watch Me Grow (2024), an ensemble of vest, purse, and gas mask, all beaded with red, white, and yellow corn seeds. Functional objects are given ample space and light—qualities that unconsciously make art look contemporary—like the exquisitely decorated canoes from the collection of Chippewa craftsman Ronald J. Paquin and Kelly Church (Match‑e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi) each perched on a pedestal in the center of its gallery.  

Church helped advise the DIA on which artists to include in the show. “Most art exhibitions just take people that they know. Curators aren’t likely to know many Native artists, because most are out there in the bigger world, doing something,” she said, noting, for example, artists who are single mothers who don’t have the financial freedom to mount an art exhibition. “This was an opportunity to suggest artists that we know are doing contemporary, museum-quality work. People that have stories to share that just hadn’t been seen,” she said. 
 
Grounded in their traditions, these artist make unmistakably individual work that swings from celebration and, elegy, to protest and rage. Horses Strickland’s Right to Consciousness (2024), a monumental canvas, depicts a group of Ojibwe people defending themselves from a deadly assault. In the caption, Strickland provides a blunt directive: “Do not let the lack of film and photographs take away from the fact that there was a genocide.” Ojibwe Two-Spirit designer Nonamey’s Dress for Nookomis (2023), painted blood red and outlined in black and white, stands as an emblem of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives movement, which raises awareness about the disproportionate degree of violence committed against Native American and First Nations women. “It exists between worlds—part textile, part memory, part protest,” Nonamey says in an accompanying video. 

“There’s always more histories to tell,” Church said. “We have our First Nations brothers and sisters, up north too. We acknowledge them in the show with Edmonia [Lewis] and Norval [Morrisseau]. I hope that this is just a spark that sparks a lot of ideas in other people’s minds.” 

During my visit earlier this fall, Patrick DesJarlait’s 1946 watercolor painting Maple Sugar Time (Red Lake Band of Ojibwe) brought the experience of visiting this updated version of the DIA —full circle. The work’s muscular characters harvest and process maple sap with a mechanical grace that recalls Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals, revealing a metaphorical thread of human labor, craft, and the particular strength of will required to thrive despite America’s structural inequities. This labor of imagination is an assertion of selfhood, whether that effort is spiritual, migratory, or aesthetic. Locke’s visionary ideal of what a museum can be points to the same: a museum that celebrates not just the art on its walls, but the people who brought it there. 
 
That vision isn’t a theory, but a practical matter for the DIA. Its workers are awaiting a union contract, calling for “the values of community, creativity, and dignity” to be “reflected not just in the art on display but in the workplace itself.” The DIA has achieved a rare feat with its presentations: making art history feel unexpected, and so, truer to life. What immediate change it chooses for its closest community—that’s a story Detroit won’t forget.