Director's Letter

In these financially tough times, I am asked why the DIA doesn't sell some of its art to help pay the bills. On the surface, it seems like a sensible business proposal, but therein also lies the problem. While I hope we run the DIA in a businesslike fashion, we are primarily not a business. We are a public trust. The DIA exists to collect, care for, and present art to the public. We do sell art from the collection, but all proceeds must be used to acquire more art. There are serious consequences--some quantifiable, others less so--for using the money for anything else.

The DIA belongs to the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), an organization comprising the approximately two hundred largest art museums in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Under its code of professional practices and ethics, using proceeds of art sales for operations or programs is strictly prohibited. Had I been writing this a year or so ago, my language would have been more conditional but, in the past eighteen months, two actual examples of sales for those purposes occurred. One was fairly straightforward. An art museum announced simultaneously that it was resigning from the association and that it had sold two paintings to help pay for operations. As a result, it has been excluded from the AAMD community. Member museums will not cooperate with it in any way: no loans of art for their exhibitions, no collaborative programs, no staff interactions. The result has been far more detrimental than the leaders of the organization anticipated. I was told on good authority, "They're really hurting."

The other example is perhaps even more dramatic. To compensate for losses caused by the 2008 downturn, the president of a university announced his intention to close its art gallery (not a member of the AAMD) and sell the collection. Presumably, to him, it seemed like a sensible business decision, but others felt strongly that more was at stake than a stock portfolio. Students, faculty, and alumni were outraged; the public outcry was instant and prolonged. Donors of art demanded the works back, potential donors clearly would have to go elsewhere, while yet others announced their intention to withdraw financial support. There was an overwhelming sense that the university was betraying its core values. The president's efforts to backtrack were unavailing and, after a few months, he was forced to resign.

In 1920, the DIA was the first U.S. art museum to acquire a Van Gogh. Imagine if, in the teeth of the Depression, when staff was reduced to a handful, the museum had opted to sell the Van Gogh, and then in the tough times of the 70s and the 90s, sell more. Each time the DIA would have been diminished by the loss of masterpieces that we could never hope to retrieve! We are working hard to solve the DIA's financial problems, and we know that things are unlikely to change any time soon. But short of an unimaginable catastrophe, the art so carefully acquired over the years will sit safely in the DIA, held in trust for you--the public.

Exhibitions

Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present

Special Exhibition Galleries: South
Through August 8

Kongo culture, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo; Caryatid Drum Depicting a European, 19th century; wood, hide, pigment. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Photograph Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum

Don't let the opportunity to view this exhibition, hailed by critics as "groundbreaking," "remarkable," and "revelatory," slip away. Reviews in the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, and New York Times all praise the scope of Through African Eyes, which explores five hundred years of cultural exchange between Africans and Europeans as seen in works by African artists.

Mark Stryker of the Free Press wrote that the breadth of this "revelatory exploration" of the European presence in Africa "enters rarified territory....Expressions of respect sit cheek-by-jowl with those of fear and ambivalence. Richly layered stories emerge, and a surprise lurks around every corner." He goes on to say that "beyond expressing beauty and emotion, art is the principal way a culture talks to itself."

Calling the exhibition "entertaining and groundbreaking, News' reviewer Michael Hodges remarked on the co-mingling of objects that showed admiration with those that represented resentment: "a healthy strand of social criticism is one of the show's delights."

And Holland Cotter of the Times praised the "remarkable" exhibition, asking "Who would have imagined, even just a few years ago, that such histories and energies could have been found in art that most of us never knew existed? Enough to say that if you get a thrill from seeing things you've never seen and thinking thoughts you've never thought, Detroit is a good place to be these days."

The exhibition catalogue, described by the Cotter as "substantial" and a "reliable indicator of new directions that the field of African art history has been taking," is available in the Museum shops. The 296-page book, with 50 illustrations, is $49.50 for members and $55 for nonmembers.

The exhibition is free for members, although timed-tickets are necessary. For the general public, tickets are $12 for adults, $6 for youth, ages six to seventeen, and $10 for groups of fifteen or more. Price includes museum admission and a multimedia tour. Reserve and purchase tickets at the DIA Box Office, at dia.org, or by calling 1.866.DIA.TIXS (1.866.342.8497). A $3.50 handling charge applies to all nonmember tickets, except those sold at the DIA.

On Fridays, the exhibition is free with museum admission. No advanced tickets are available, except for groups of fifteen or more.

This exhibition has been organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Generous support has been provided by the Friends of African and African American Art, the DTE Energy Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support has been provided by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the City of Detroit.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955

Special Exhibition Galleries: Central
Through July 3

Robert Frank, American (born Switzerland); Assembly Plant, Ford, Detroit, 1955; gelatin silver print. Founders Society Purchase, Coville Photographic Fund © Robert Frank

Robert Frank was the first photographer to make the city of Detroit, the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge complex, and the auto workers who toiled there a serious subject for the camera. In his travels across the country in 1955, the automobile was something he saw everywhere and one of his foremost priorities when considering subjects for his groundbreaking book The Americans.

Frank thought it important to show where the cars were made, but it was difficult to get permission and gain access into what the photographer once described as "God's factory." He was one of the few artists--Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera being two others--allowed inside the Rouge. He was amazed to witness the transformation of raw materials into fully assembled cars and spent two days photographing workers on the assembly lines, then following them as they ventured into the city after quitting time.

Frank's focus was different than previous artists who depicted the Rogue. He pushed the aesthetic boundaries of the photographic medium unlike anyone before him, shooting quickly, sometimes tilting and blurring compositions, and presenting people and their surroundings in fleeting and fragmentary moments with an unsentimental eye. Sheeler's photographs from the 1920s paid homage to the factory as the cathedral of industry, and workers were nowhere to be found. In preparation for his Detroit Industry murals, Rivera toured the facility with a Ford Motor Company photographer in tow. In his work, it is the workers who take on heroic proportions.

Lecture: Photography writer Philip Gefter discusses Robert Frank and the Beat Generation
Friday, June 4, 7:30 p.m., DIA's Lecture Hall

Seventy-third Annual Detroit Public Schools Student Exhibition

Walter Gibbs Learning Center in the Wayne & Joan Webber Education Wing
Through May 30

Tina Wilkerson, For Edna, Painting Crosman High School, Grade 9

Check out the latest Detroit Public Schools Student Exhibition on view through the end of the month. The show features more than 300 works by young artists, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, in a range of mediums, including drawing, ceramics, collage, fibers, and jewelry.

The works in the exhibition were selected by a jury of artists representing the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Public Schools from 737 pieces of student art submitted by art teachers from forty-two Detroit Public Schools. To view scenes of how the exhibition came together and a representative sample of the student art, click here.

The Seventy-third Annual Student Exhibition was organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Public Schools and is made possible with the support of the Ruth T. Cattell Education Endowment Fund, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the City of Detroit. Additional support provided by General Motors Corporation, JP Morgan Chase, and MASCO Corporation.

New On View

Nancy Spero, American; Mourning Women, 2000; hand printing and printed collage on paper. Museum Purchase, W. Hawkins Ferry Fund and Friends of Modern Art Acquisition Fund

Nancy Spero, a pioneering artist engaged in political and feminist issues over the past half-century, created narratives that address the effects of war, torture, sexuality, birth, grief, and suffering in women's lives. These themes became the leitmotifs of her long career. Her early work included dark representations of lovers or mother and child compositions. In the late 1960s, she moved away from a domestic focus and began to explore topical themes of war and the victimization of women as a way to sustain her figural representations in a climate that favored abstract, pop, and minimalist art. Her shift in subject was mirrored by a change of medium from traditional oil painting to the use of appropriated images printed in new contexts on fragile paper supports.

In Mourning Women, Spero borrows imagery from a burial procession depicted in the tomb of Ramose, in Thebes, Egypt, painted during the thirteenth century b.c.e. Printed in somber hues, her multipanel work features a sequence of female mourners, repeated eight times as a whole and four times as partial groupings, spread across four individual panels that read right to left, starting at the top, like some hieroglyphs. When hung as a thirty-three-foot frieze, the subtle shifts in color and spacing create a rhythm punctuated by expanses of colored inks.

The sequence begins at the right of panel one, where a small group of figures on a light ground represent the mourners as they enter the darkened tunnel into the tomb. The procession of women pauses in the colorful void of panel two, picks up the pace in the third, and culminates in an apparent torch-lit funeral chamber near the left edge of the fourth panel.

Throughout Mourning Women, Spero prints the same figure group but varies it each time through changes in hue, figure-ground relationship, overprinting, or collage. By multiplying and diversifying the image, the artist joins the groups into a visual chorus that does not sound as a single tone but rather as a harmonious chord.

Member Double DIscount Days

Don't miss Double Discount Days for members at the Museum shop and the Through African Eyes: The European in African Art exhibition shop, Friday, May 7, through Sunday, May 16. Members receive a 20 percent discount, double their usual 10 percent.

For example, the exhibition catalogue for Through African Eyes, regularly $49.50 for members, is now $44. Similar discounts are available on other exhibition-related items, as well as decorative arts, textiles, educational items, craft kits, paper products, and publications in the main Museum shop.