Portrait Relief of François René de Chateaubriand, 1830
Pierre-Jean David d'Angers, French, 1788-1856
Bronze
Bronze
gelatin silver print
four-color halftone print from autochrome positive
watercolor (applied to both recto and verso) and pen and black ink on japanese paper
linoleum cut printed in color ink on wove paper
etching printed in black ink on laid paper
etching printed in black ink on laid paper
tintypes in album pages bound in red leather embossed leather case with gold inpainting and gold metal clasp
aquatint printed in black ink on laid paper
gelatin silver print
brush and black ink and pastel on cream wove paper
Heliogravure printed in black on japan paper
paint on canvas
carved wood chair, steel mount under boot
oil on preprimed canvas
linoleum cut printed in black ink on japan paper
lithograph printed in black ink on wove paper
D-Cyphered: Portraits by Jenny Risher will take viewers on a photographic timeline that makes up the story of the Detroit hip-hop scene. Often overlooked by the movements in New York and Los Angeles, Detroit’s hip-hop history is deeply shaped by the various elements of Motown and Detroit techno. Since the emergence of Eminem and his movie 8 Mile, and the recognition of the genius of the late J. Dilla, Detroit has seen a deep underground scene emerge and gain national recognition. Through th...
The Detroit Institute of Arts will present a dossier exhibition featuring two masterworks of French eighteenth-century portrait sculpture lent from the Musée du Louvre. Created by the greatest sculptor of the Enlightenment, Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828), the portraits depict two of America’s most iconic founders, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. As Guests of Honor, the portraits will be displayed in the company of selected works that similarly depict Franklin, Washington, and Robert...
Fusing art and fashion photography in ways that break down their long-established boundaries, The New Black Vanguard features vibrant color portraits, conceptual images, and fashion editorial photographs by groundbreaking Black photographers. Over 100 photographs–many found in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on social media channels–open up conversations around the roles of the Black body and Black lives as subject matter.
The nineteen sculptures in this exhibit—made between 1850 and 2000—show different approaches American artists used to confront the past, shape the present, and hope for a brighter future. A bronze portrait transforms an American businessman into a Roman emperor. A pyramid of plywood reimagines the form of an ancient wonder. Abstract steel and fiberglass ice cream challenged notions of what a monument could be. Some were made for private commemoration and others for busy city streets. &...
Subjects from everyday life, local architecture and portraits are included in this exhibition that presents found photography drawn from the DIA’s and private collections in the U.S. Found photography is considered by museums and collectors as an “accidental” art form created by unknown and often untrained photographers. Rediscovered and recovered from flea and antique markets, online resale sites, in attics, yard sales or even found in the trash, found photography speaks to past eras, people an...
In this exhibition are over forty large-scale color and black-and-white photographs by Kwame Brathwaite. His work helped advance one of the most influential cultural movements of the 1960s, "Black Is Beautiful," when black women and men turned to natural hairstyles and African-inspired clothing. Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite is the first major exhibition dedicated to Brathwaite, a vital figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by activist and black n...
The DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts) proudly presents the exhibition, James Barnor: Accra/London—A Retrospective, a comprehensive survey of the work of Ghanaian photographer James Barnor whose career spans more than six decades. A studio portraitist, photojournalist, and Black lifestyle photographer, Barnor was born in 1929 in the West African nation of Ghana. He established his famous Ever Young Studio in Accra in the early 1950s and devoted his early photography to documenting critical soc...
The Detroit Institute of Arts presents a survey of over 90 photographs by Russ Marshall whose black-and-white imagery was inspired by the Motor City’s streets, architecture, music and factory workers for over 50 years. Marshall was born in 1940 in the thriving coal-mining town of South Fork, Pennsylvania to a family of coal miners, farmers and industrial factory workers. His family relocated to Detroit in 1943. By the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Marshall had begun to phot...
The DIA welcomes Samuel F. B. Morse's painting Gallery of the Louvre as a "guest of honor" from June 16 to September 18, 2016.Gallery of the Louvre is on loan from the Terra Foundation for American Art and also includes Morse's copy of Titian's famous portrait of the French King Francis I, made from the original at the Louvre. The 6.2 x 9-ft. Gallery of the Louvre depicts a gallery imagined by Morse, in which he included 38 miniature versions of what were then the Lou...
Detroit After Dark is a dramatic display of light and dark, a photography exhibition of works from the DIA's permanent collection. Detroit After Dark is free with general museum admission. General museum admission is free for residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Detroit After Dark includes architectural studies, street scenes and graffiti, as well as some of Detroit’s famous night haunts, like jazz club Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the legendary Grande Ballroom, an...
In the aftermath of World War II, Ypsilanti-based designer Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) was quick to realize that over the four years during which Detroit’s Big Three had forsaken individual automobile production to focus on the war effort, Americans had developed a voracious appetite for new cars. Tucker’s answer was to independently create an innovative “car of the future,” featuring pioneering safety features and modern streamlined styling, including a center-mounted “cyclops” headlight that...
Senegal/1973—directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 89 minutes With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this New Wave–influenced fantasy drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical. Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, the alternately manic and meditative Touki B...
USA/2022—directed by Nancy Buirski | 101 minutes A half century after its release, Midnight Cowboy remains one of the ground-breaking movies of the modern era. With electric performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as loners who join forces out of desperation, blacklist survivor Waldo Salt's brilliant screenplay and John Schlesinger's fearless direction, the 1969 film became the only X-rated release to ever win the Academy Award® for Best Picture. Its vivid yet compassionate d...
In the shadow of the pandemic, a small town rallies to protect a beloved local bookstore in its hour of need. A landmark in Lenox, Massachusetts since 1976, The Bookstore is a magical, beatnik gem thanks to its owner, Matt Tannenbaum, whose passion for stories runs deep. Charming and eccentric, Matt is surrounded by great literature, friendly neighbors and tree-lined streets, in a town where time stood still. Presiding at The Bookstore for over forty years, Matt is a true bard of th...
(USA/1939—directed by Leo C. Popkin) Louise Beavers gives a commanding lead performance as the crusading Mother Barton in this race film long believed to be lost. Beavers plays a probation officer who comes to the defense of young inmate Freddie (Reginald Fenderson) and his pals (the Harlem Tuff Kids) who are subject to constant harassment at a corrupt reform school. The film’s director, Leo Popkin, is one of the three co-founders of the Million Dollar Productions company that produced ...
USA/2024 — dir. Dawn Porter The signer Luther Vandross started his career supporting David Bowie, Roberta Flack, Bette Midler, and many more. He was nicknamed "the Velvet Voice," and despite having multiple platinum albums and top 10 hits, he struggled to break out of the R&B charts. “Considering the stamp he put on the American music industry, it feels strange there hasn’t yet been a documentary about his legacy until Dawn Porter’s Luther: Never Too Much … after experiencing her lov...
USA/2022—directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen | 96 min. Join us for a screening of The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks, followed by a special conversation moderated by the film’s executive producer Soledad O’Brien, and joined by Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Secretary of State, Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers, the film’s directors Yoruba Richen and Johanna Hamilton, Dr. Jeanne Theoharis and Lonnie McCauley, Rosa Parks’ grandnephew. The Rebe...
France/2021—directed by Mathieu Amalric | 97 minutes As Clarisse, a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) brings another riveting characterization to the big screen. Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is renowned internationally as one of France’s great contemporary actors. With Hold Me Tight (Serre moi fort) – his sixth and most ambitious feature as director – he’ll, at last, be known in America for his...
A searing, indelible, now-classic portrait of anti-colonial struggle in 1970s Africa, Sarah Maldoror’s adaptation of a novella by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira was banned by the Angolan government until the country obtained its independence from Portugal in 1975. Sambizanga follows Maria (unforgettably portrayed by Cape Verdean economist Elisa Andrade) as she tries to pick up the pieces after her husband, a secret anti-colonial activist, becomes a political prisoner. Co-written by M...
Join frame historian Tracy Gill, co-founder of New York’s Gill & Lagodich Fine Period Frames, who will discuss the evolution of frame styles over two centuries of American art. Drawing on examples from DIA’s collection, Gill will survey changing tastes from 17th-century painted frames and gilded hand-carved fancies to innovative 19th-century trends and opulent models from the Gilded Age. She will discuss the artist-designed frames on James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Gr...
Learning about history from art A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity and honor to speak at the Livonia Town Hall Lecture Series. Over 400 members of our communities, many of them seniors from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, welcomed me warmly – one even placed a flower on my lapel before I stepped onto the podium. As I normally do, I started by explaining the reasons I came to Detroit and the many things I have learned during the 11 years I have lived with my family in Michig...
Conservation on display During the years I served as a DIA curator, I spent much time doing research in our conservation department. Exploring artwork under a microscope, discovering the elemental composition of pigments used during the Renaissance, and examining paintings with the help of X-radiography, raking or ultraviolet light were and still are some of my favorite activities. Not many people know that the DIA is not only one of the best museums in the country, but also one that is eq...
The importance of empty piazzas Early in March, I was in Mount Clemens leading a tour of some DIA painting reproductions installed there for residents of Macomb County. It was a fun crowd to be with and I had the opportunity to speak about one of my favorite works in our collection: Canaletto’s Piazza di San Marco. The image shows one of the most famous town squares in the world, located in Venice (Italy), during a sunny winter morning. Scattered throughout the civic space one can observ...
Reopening your DIA Dear Friends, This Friday, July 10, we will reopen the DIA for our members and tri-county residents and on July 15 to the general public. We wanted to do it this way to signal how grateful we are to Macomb, Wayne and Oakland counties for their recent millage renewal on March 10. Our re-opening team has done an extraordinary job putting together a plan with NSF International. We will have the necessary protocols in place with the highest standards so our workplace a...
Fulfilling our mission I could not start this monthly letter without expressing how terribly saddened I am by the events Detroit and the nation have seen during the last week. At the DIA, we stand in solidarity with the people of Detroit and those around the world appealing for an end to racism, inequality, brutality and fear. The Detroit Institute of Arts commits to serving as a place of inclusion, diversity and equity for everyone in our community and beyond. We believe in th...
The impact of the DIA In 2015 when I became the DIA director, I started to travel in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties to any public place that would give me a microphone and an audience to speak to. I believed (and I still do) that it was necessary for everyone to be aware not only of the great art treasures that we keep in public trust, but also the extraordinary focus that our team places on our visitors and their experiences in the museum. I met many individuals from our tri-counties who...
Kermit at the DIA A couple of months ago, during our standing Tuesday Strategy Group meeting, where all the division heads gather to establish our chief lines of action, one of my colleagues announced that Kermit The Frog and Howdy Doody were going to go on display in our puppet case. I was familiar with the latter, but I had never heard the word Kermit in my life. So one of my colleagues pulled out her phone and showed me who Kermit was. Oh! I said, that is La Rana Gustavo (Kermit the ...
Starting the next chapter A couple of weeks ago my wife, Alex, drove our daughter Piper to New York City, where she is starting college this week. While they were traveling, I spent a good amount of time thinking about the current year, the upcoming one, and the opportunities we have ahead of us. With the school year just started, one looks back at 2020 and has the impression that much of the time was devoted to managing a world health crisis and how we have adapted to it. Let’s not forget, h...
Conservation Science After a short and very much enjoyed holiday break, I returned to work last week and started to catch up with our very exciting initiatives for 2020. I also had lunch with one of our patrons, who is a keen art collector and a very committed DIA supporter of our education work. He just got back from London where he saw beautiful art shows at the British Museum, National Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum among other institutions. We had a very animated conversation...
An unexpected time Over the last couple of days Tony Drake, DIA volunteer manager, has shared with me a number of images showing many of our volunteers as DIA visitors enjoying our galleries. During the last months, I have seen Tony walking around the museum with his camera taking pictures of our staff on-site to keep us engaged and upbeat during these challenging times. His friendly photos of our visiting volunteers are accompanied by a DIA floor plan indicating the location in which they we...
Through exploration of portraiture and self-portraiture across time and cultures in the DIA’s collection, students will understand how artists use pose, symbolism, clothing, facial expression, objects and other details to communicate information about people’s identity in portraits and their place within their culture.
Using Jean-Antoine Houdon’s portraits of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington at the Detroit Institute of Arts, students will explore the life stories of these figures to deepen their understanding of the importance of individual political and social contributions during the American Revolutionary period.
Students call upon their own life experiences and imagination in these drawing activities as they explore what elements can be used to create a still life, portrait, and self-portrait.