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“Detroit is a city of relationships,” Jova Lynne, an artist, curator, and codirector of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, tells me on a chilly day in December. I was in town to check out Detroit’s rapidly expanding art scene, and already this was clear to me. Collaboration is not just some buzzword, but at the core of how things get done.
Lynne is explaining this as she shows me a few works from the upcoming career survey of Olayami Dabls, a local artist and the founder of Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum, a cultural institution rooted in African materiality and storytelling on Detroit’s west side. For years, Lynne has wanted to stage an exhibition of Dabls’s work—paintings, sculptures, public murals, and assemblages made of wood, rocks, beads, bits of mirror, and other objects—but it was important to her to get it right.
“He’s a Detroit legend, and he has not had a solo museum show in 40-plus years,” Lynne noted. She knew an exhibition of such breadth would take time, and no small amount of coordination.
But the collaborative efforts paid off, and this past weekend “Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies” was one of four exhibitions that opened at MOCAD, which together ring in a new chapter at the museum and kick off its 20th anniversary year.
The new shows coincide with the museum’s grand reopening after an eight-month closure for renovations. MOCAD’s main building, originally an auto showroom built in 1907 by famed Detroit architect Albert Kahn, needed upgrades to the HVAC system, roof, and admissions desk, and a solid wall along bustling Woodward Avenue is now a massive picture window, giving passersby a chance to glimpse the art from the street.
But the jubilation over MOCAD’s reopening is not just because of a refreshed building. The museum is reemerging from a reckoning in 2020, not unlike those at other cultural institutions; following accusations of a toxic workplace and racial microaggressions, the former MOCAD director was ousted. In 2023, Lynne and Marie Madison-Patton were named the museum’s new codirectors, and the two have been instrumental in resetting MOCAD’s priorities—doubling down on accessibility, civic engagement, and education in addition to celebrating local contemporary art.
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“As we head into our 20th year, we are really looking at: What is the role of the museum? Our mission is driven by cultural exchange, so how can we drive that even further? And the renovation is a big part of that,” says Lynne.
These questions about the museum’s purpose have never been more urgent, with Detroit experiencing a cultural renaissance that has brought much change to the city over the last few years. “It’s important that as the city changes, we change with the city,” says Madison-Patton, who runs the business and operations side of the museum, while Lynne leads the curatorial vision. As a noncollectsing contemporary art museum—the only such institution in Detroit—MOCAD can respond quickly to what’s going on in the community.
“Our leadership is unique, as co-leaders, as women of color,” says Lynne. “What does that mean in a city that’s rapidly changing, and how can we best advocate for marginalized voices to remain at the table?”
As MOCAD reopens, it is joined by a plethora of new arts initiatives that seek to build on the rich creative legacy of Detroit. Julie Egan, a fourth-generation Detroiter with a background in international diplomacy, founded Detroit Salon as a way to address two issues: helping Detroit artists access other markets, and launching a new biennial-like event that “will take up a serious spot on the global art world calendar to get people to Detroit,” she says.
“It’s well-known that Detroit has had a prolific contemporary art community, so this is not a discovery,” she continues. “But what was interesting was how many times I heard from members of the ecosystem, from individual artists to big institutions, that one of the missing links was a bridge-building capacity.”
Detroit Salon is currently in its “roadshow” phase, popping up at Art Basel in Paris last fall and in Basel this coming June, getting the word out about all the great stuff going on in Michigan. Zahra Almajidi, who exhibited an exquisite metalwork-framed mirror with Detroit Salon in Paris, relished the chance to showcase her city abroad. “A lot of people may think Detroit is small, but there are a lot of exciting things happening,” she told me when I visited her studio at Omnicorp, a collaborative maker and artist space near Detroit’s Eastern Market.
After a few more stops in Marrakech, London, New York, and Hong Kong, the inaugural Detroit Salon event is slated for 2028, joining two other fairs—Season Fair and Mighty Real / Queer Detroit—that have recently launched in the city.
Events like these, and the city’s art scene in general, are also helping change the outdated narrative of Detroit as a city of industrial decline and municipal bankruptcy to one of exciting possibilities, a place where you can live comfortably as an artist and build things.
As the chief curator of the Cranbrook Art Museum—part of the greater Cranbrook campus in suburban Bloomfield Hills, which also houses the esteemed Cranbrook Academy of Art—Laura Mott has experienced this first-hand. “Many people from Cranbrook have started to stay,” Mott says. (Lynne, originally from New York, is an alum, as is Almajidi.) “Cranbrook has been around since the 1930s as a national and international destination as an art school, but it was more likely that someone would come here for two years, then leave.”
Part of what keeps them in Detroit is this growing art ecosystem, and perhaps nowhere is it more apparent than in Detroit’s East Village neighborhood, where gallery owners JJ and Anthony Curis have created a kind of arts campus called Little Village, anchored by The Shepherd, a converted 100-year-old church that now functions as an art gallery and gathering place. (Its next show was just announced—in June, Mickalene Thomas will stage a show of new work that focuses on masculinity and the Black male body.)
Other rehabbed buildings in Little Village include the Lantern and Cadillac Arts Centre, which both house a mix of artist studios, nonprofits, and retail spaces, and the forthcoming Stanton Yards, where philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert will open her new arts nonprofit, Lumana, next year. (Further evidence of the Detroit web: Cranbrook is doing the inaugural exhibition at Lumana, which will showcase the museum’s new Detroit collectsion of local artists.)
The Curises’ foray into the art world began in 2012, when they opened their downtown gallery, Library Street Collective. They quickly realized that in order to succeed in Detroit and do right by the city, “we weren’t going to operate as a regular gallery…. We needed to do public projects, we needed to engage the local community in a different way,” says JJ. As the couple’s various businesses have grown in the decade-plus since, that collaboration has remained key.
The new creative energy pulsing through the city is undeniable, but ingenuity has been a defining principle of Detroit for a long, long time—something that many of the women I spoke with for this story were sure to point out. “In terms of creativity, it’s been off the charts the whole time, and also very much sustained by the Black artist community,” says Mott.
I kept thinking about what Lynne had said about relationships being so central to the city. It had become obvious: Just about everyone I talked to had some sort of professional overlap, having worked together at one institution or another.
As she moved through MOCAD’s plastic-covered gallery space showing me more of Dabls’s incredible artworks, Lynne paused before taking stock of what it is they’re trying to create here—with the show, at the museum, in the city at large. “It’s about really working together to make something beautiful happen.”
