“Reimagine African American Art”
Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit
Oct. 15, 2025
Art is visual storytelling, capturing a feeling, a moment, a place or an idea with color and form. It is tightly linked with history.When that art is lost or underdeveloped, so is part of that history. The Detroit Institute of Art’s revamped African American arts galleries, which just reopened with a whole new look and location, seek to course correct.
“Reimagine African American Art” encompasses four galleries located adjacent to the DIA’s iconic Rivera Court in the center of the museum. It features 50 works from the museum’s approximately 700-piece collection of African American art and includes paintings, sculptures, photography, prints and furniture. The galleries are organized chronologically, capturing key moments in African American history from the 1800s through the 1980s including the Civil Rights era, the Harlem Renaissance, Social Realism and the Black Arts Movement.
Curator Valerie Mercer said she approached the new installation with the idea of filling in gaps in cultural knowledge and art history.
“It’s so important to focus on African American art here [in Detroit] and to teach people that there really is a history to African American art and art history,” she said. “Most people don’t realize that.”
One of the works that stood out to me was Augusta Savage’s “Gamin,” a haunting bust of a young boy dating from around 1930. “Gamin” is the French word for a homeless child; the bust was meant to represent the Black children Savage saw on the streets of Harlem every day. Similarly, Hughie Lee-Smith’s 1953 painting “The Piper” depicts a young boy, alone on the streets of Detroit playing a pipe, representing the alienation and hope felt by migrants during The Great Migration.
Another powerful work was “Black Attack” from 1967 by Allie McGhee, a living Detroit artist. The painting depicts a scene from Detroit’s 1967 race riots with a Black man defending himself, capturing the intensity and gravity of the moment. I also enjoyed Benny Andrew’s 1963 “Southern Pasture,” a textured painting depicting two Black women looking beyond the other side of a line of barbed wire, a metaphor for the barriers of the segregating Jim Crow laws.
Not all pieces have themes rooted in social justice and the African American experience; that’s part of the point. Near Robert Seldon Duncanson’s 1853 painting “Uncle Tom and Little Eva,” which depicts a scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery novel, is an 1846 postmortem portrait of William Berthelet, a young boy, commissioned by his grandfather. One of Duncan’s landscape portraits is displayed nearby.
Edward Mitchell Bannister’s 1879-80 “Peasants in Forest” is a bucolic image set in the French countryside near Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1899 “Flight Into Egypt” with a Christian scene, capturing the Holy Family on their journey to safety in Egypt. The joyful, yellow final room with the most recent works is full of colorful, abstract art.
The combination both highlights African American history and experiences while also showcasing the sheer talent and scope of African American artists, independent of subject matter. Paired with the installation’s new central location, it affirms that African American art and history are an essential part of American art and history and should be valued as such.
