Join fine artist / muralist Phillip Simpson on the DIA lawn to work on a collaborative large-scale canvas mural project! Visitors can enjoy the sights and sounds of Concert of Colors and have a chance to make a mini piece of art based on Simpson's work.

Draw your own design or find an image from a magazine to create your very own wearable piece of art on a 2-inch pin-back button! No experience necessary. All supplies provided.

Join DanceAbility, Detroit's movement and sound improvisations, at the DIA. The event will start the Great Hall, where we'll introduce ourselves through moving (and pausing) in all our different ways, dancing with live musicians.

The program will travel at a pace that works for all, improvising with the art around us and the public who may join us. We'll end the day at a sculpture outside the museum, weather permitting. Wear shades of blue, since we are the water and the boat flowing through...

DanceAbility at the DIA is a program of Detroit Disability Power, funded in part by the Michigan Arts & Culture Council.

Image Description: Dancers of different races, ages and genders are aboard an imaginary sailboat with green sails and a red mast flag under three museum arches. Waves ripple past one dancer joyfully extending his arms from his wheelchair, another standing with her arms outstretched, and two more making shapes with their arms and legs.

Create a pencil drawing to take home while taking a closer look at the work in the DIA's new installation, Tiff Massey: 7 Mile + Livernois. No experience necessary. All supplies provided. For ages 6 and up (children ages 12 and younger should be accompanied by an adult).

image: Tiff Massey, (American, b. 1982). Everyday Arsenal, 2018. Steel. Collection of the artist.

Use felt, ribbon, and a tongue depressor to turn a butterfly, snake, spider, fish, or a creature of your imagination into a whimsical marionette. No experience necessary. All supplies provided.

This event was previously scheduled to take place on the South Lawn but has been moved to the Native American galleries due to weather.

Special outdoors event! Create a pencil drawing to take home while enjoying the sculptures, fountains, and gardens of the beautiful DIA grounds.

No experience necessary. All supplies provided. For ages 6 and up (children ages 12 and younger should be accompanied by an adult).

Create a pencil drawing to take home while taking a closer look at the collection. No experience necessary. All supplies provided. For ages 6 and up (children ages 12 and younger should be accompanied by an adult).

Create a pencil drawing to take home while taking a closer look at the collection. No experience necessary. All supplies provided. For ages 6 and up (children ages 12 and younger should be accompanied by an adult).

Please join the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art for our Annual Meeting from 5:30–6 p.m.  
At 6 p.m., guest artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons will give a lecture on her work, which is free with registration.

The lecture will be followed by an exclusive FMCA Member reception in FJC Dining Rooms A&B.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation. Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in Cuba and resides in Nashville, Tennessee. She has served as Vanderbilt Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University since 2017.

Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Behold, a survey of her work spanning four decades, is currently on tour at the Brooklyn Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, closing May 4, 2025. She has presented over thirty solo performances commissioned by institutions that include the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Her works are held in more than thirty museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 2023, Campos-Pons was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship for exploring personal and collective histories across the Caribbean with a distinctive and expansive visual style. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Campos-Pons has founded or co-founded several non-profit arts organizations including the Intermittent Rivers, a Biennial Project in Matanzas, Cuba; the Engine for Art Democracy and Justice at Vanderbilt with Vanderbilt and Fisk University; and When We Gather, a multi-faceted art project celebrating the elemental role women have played in the United States.

The Detroit Institute of Arts acquired Campos-Pons’s work Soy una Fuente (I Am a Fountain) in 2023.

Photo courtesy of the artist.  

USA/1938—directed by Oscar Micheaux | 73 min.

An idealistic Harvard graduate returns to the segregated South to establish a grade school, and encounters opposition from both the white and Black communities. Starring Ethel Moses and a bevy of moonlighting Cotton Club dancers, Birthright was an early, brutal critique of segregation and Jim Crow laws, and was criticized for its graphic depiction of institutionalized racism.

Micheaux responded to the criticism by publishing a declaration of his intentions as a filmmaker, reflecting the ideals of his lead character:

“I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life… It is only by presenting those portions of the race portrayed in my pictures, in light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights.”