The revitalization of Detroit, spurred by significant corporate movement back to the city’s downtown, is making a big leap forward culturally this month with the opening of a new Museum of African American History.
The first attraction in the new exhibition space–“Of the People: The African American Experience”–is virtually the entire history of African people in North America, from the “Middle Passage” dislocations and early American slavery through Reconstruction, the struggle for political empowerment, the African-American Renaissance of the early 20th Century and the civil rights movement.
Occupying 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, this will be the museum’s core exhibit and will be on indefinite display.
In June, the museum will add the temporary show “Africa: One Continent, Many Worlds,” a traveling version of the Chicago Field Museum’s permanent African exhibit. Next October, it will show “Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou,” better known as “voodoo.”
The museum was originally founded in 1965 as a smaller facility known as the Afro-American Museum of Detroit, but was less centrally located and in cramped quarters.
Not only is the new Museum of African American History situated in the midst of the city’s downtown Cultural Center at Warren and Brush Streets (313-494-5800), but is at 120,000 square feet four times the size of the original place. The new museum cost $38.4 million and is being financed through a municipal bond issue.
The largest exhibition ever staged on African-American history, “Of the People” will cover four centuries of the African experience in North America. Among the highlights of the show are a replica of a 70-foot slave ship with 50 lifesize slave figures aboard, astronaut Mae Jemison’s NASA flight suit and a replica of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birmingham (Ala.) jailhouse door.
On view from June 7 through Sept. 7, “One Continent, Many Worlds” will have 8,500 square feet of displays, many of which are to be interactive. There’s even a robotic rhinoceros.
The voodoo show, Oct. 10-Dec. 21, is mostly an art exhibit, but its 500 objects will include sacred bottles, painted calabashes, beaded rattles and the like in addition to paintings.
Collector’s show
The greatest American art collections were amassed by the rich of the turn-of-the-century “Gilded Age.” Pittsburgh was home to many, with some 1,000 of the world’s most prized paintings hanging on the walls of local mansions at century’s end.
Among the most notable were those of peerless collectors Andrew Mellon, founding patron of Washington’s National Gallery of Art, and Henry Clay Frick, the man behind New York’s Frick Collection and Pittsburgh’s Frick Art Museum.
An exhibition of 130 of their and other Pittsburgh collectors’ most treasured paintings, many of which have not been shown in public for decades, has just opened at the Frick Art Museum (7227 Reynolds St., Pittsburgh; 412-371-0600). Called “Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890-1910,” and on view through June 29, it presents masterworks by Corot, Delacroix, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and many others, in a setting that recreates the opulent splendor of the period and social class.
Mignot’s landscape
New York’s National Academy of Design, just up from the Frick Collection at 1083 5th Ave. (212-369-4880), is featuring through May 11 a rediscovery of Louis Remy Mignot, one of the important Hudson River school of American landscape painters who faded from public attention after his death at age 39 in 1870.
The last exhibition of this Charleston-born painter’s works was in 1876.
A contemporary and traveling companion of the great Frederic Church, Mignot was a romantic who became obsessed with the then thrillingly exotic continent of South America, and journeyed to its interior as though into a human soul.
In 1862, he moved to Europe, where he worked with a number of the artists who were preparing the way for Impressionism. Mignot planned to move on to Asia and explore the Himalayas, but the 1870 Franco-Prussian War instead compelled him to flee to Britain, where he contracted smallpox and died.
The show, “The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad,” contains 50 paintings, among them his majestic 1859 “Landscape in Equador.” Katherine Manthorne, associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois, is a curator of the exhibition.
The Met’s Paris 12
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710) has a very special show up through May 4: “Twelve Artists of the School of Paris.” The gifts of the late collector Florene M. Schoenborn, wife of Chicago architect Samuel Marx, these 15 paintings and three sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Amedeo Modigliani and others are icons of early 20th Century art. Picasso’s 1929 “Nude Standing by the Sea” and Brancusi’s celebrated 1923 “Bird in Space” sculpture are among these splendid bequests.
Southern Cal
Southern California has had some noted and discerning art collectors too. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Blvd., 213-857-6000) has put together a show of 75 of their holdings–spanning 150 years of American art from Gilbert Stuart to Georgia O’Keeffe.
Trompe l’oeil
Washington’s Renwick Gallery, across from the White House at Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street (202-357-2700) is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an exhibition of contemporary craft art that goes beyond mere decoration to playing delightful games with the mind.
The 100 objects of wood, clay, glass, fiber and metal include, for example, Wendell Castle’s 1985 “Ghost Clock,” which closer examination reveals is not a clock at all and hasn’t anything really to do with time.
An adjunct of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Renwick is perhaps the finest museum of its kind in the country and an obligatory stop for any devotee of the art of crafts.
