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).
 

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).

Use one of our patterns or make your own to create one-of-a-kind outfits for a paper doll, inspired by costumes on view in Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, and elsewhere in the DIA galleries. No experience necessary. All supplies provided.

Use fabric, paper, and other materials to create your own collage self-portrait influenced by artists in the DIA collection including Benny Andrews, Betye Saar, and Mickalene Thomas. All supplies provided. Free with admission.

(USA/1937—directed by Sam Newfield) 

In this long-unavailable film, singer Herb Jeffries makes his cinematic debut as a strapping young cowpoke who comes to the rescue of a traveling medicine show battling outlaws for buried treasure.

Filmed at a Black-owned ranch in California’s Apple Valley, the film also includes Spencer Williams (director of The Blood of Jesus) and doo-wop quartet the Four Tones.

Newly restored, Harlem on the Prairie is packed with priceless music, thrills, romance, and the comedy of renowned actors Mantan Moreland and Flournoy E. Miller. (57 min.) 

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

The Friends of African and African American Art will present the 31st Annual Alain Locke Awards to artist Nari Ward.

Ward will receive the Alain Locke International Award for his creation of sculptural installations over the past 40 years made from discarded material found and collected. He recontextualizes this material in thought-provoking juxtapositions that convey complex metaphorical meanings to confront social and political realities surrounding race, migration, democracy, and community. Currently he is the distinguished professor and head of studio art at Hunter College in New York.

The Alain Locke Recognition Award will be received by Linda and David Whitaker, renowned collectors of African and African American Art who often generously share their knowledge of this endeavor with the community.  

A reception will follow the awards event.
 

Join author Alan Scott Pate for a presentation about a unique moment in Japanese-American history and the fine art of doll-making. In the late 1920s, during a time of escalating tensions between the US and Japan, two friends—Japanese business leader Eiichi Shibusawa and American educator Sidney Gulick—developed a program for children in each country to exchange dolls as a gesture of friendship and cultural understanding.

The American children sent more than 12,000 dolls, mass-produced but carefully customized for the program down to passports and train tickets, to their Japanese counterparts, who responded with 58 ichimatsu Friendship Dolls. Meticulously crafted by master artists, the Friendship Dolls were made to be ambassadors, each one as unique as the prefecture they represented. 

Alan Scott Pate is a noted authority on the history of Japanese dolls, known as ningyo. His publications include Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll (2005) and Art as Ambassador: The Japanese Friendship Dolls of 1927 (2015).

This lecture is made possible with support from the Japanese Business Society of Detroit Foundation and the Audley M. Grossman Puppetry Fund.
 

Join Dr. Peter Bell, curator of European Paintings, Sculpture & Drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in an insightful look at the bronze statuette during the Renaissance.

The independent bronze statuette emerged in the second half of the 15th century in central and northern Italy as a type of art object prized in court and university circles. Its proliferation in the decades around 1500 is a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance.

The meaningful confluence of material, size, and subject in the Renaissance bronze statuette, and its unique relationship to its beholder, is beautifully illustrated by four of the earliest and most celebrated statuettes. On loan from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, they are the focus of an exceptional exhibition at the DIA, on view through March 3, 2024. 

This lecture is free with registration and open to all DIA visitors!
 

A virtual conversation with Dr. Kwame Tua Opoku (on YouTube)

African Art in Western Museums: Making the Case for Object Repatriations

After decades of refusal to restitute looted African artifacts, Western museums and governments started in 2022 to return objects to the African States following a historic declaration by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017. The Friends of African and African American Art of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ 2023 nominee for the Margaret Herz Demant African Art Award, Dr. Kwame Tua Opoku (pictured), is a retired United Nations Legal Advisor and a recognized voice in African repatriations.

In a live virtual conversation with Dr. Nii Quarcoopome, Curator of African Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Dr. Opoku will discuss his vast experience with restitutions and the nuances and challenges confronting the debate. Also, he will address, among other topics, the merits and demerits of the partial repatriation of African cultural patrimony, when necessary, as part of the broader dialogue about decolonizing Western museums.