The Detroit Institute of Arts

This morning I watched Frida, a film about the life of Frida Kahlo, hoping to see scenes of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera painting a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). There were none, but I got a nice jolt of renewed appreciation for Kahlo’s paintings.

Defeated by my first attempt to start researching the museum, I got on the Internet and read some articles about Detroit. As I did this, the voice of Brazilian Caetano Veloso sang “Burn it Blue” in my head. This song played at the end of Frida and Caetano's voice… it sticks with you. It’s the same one that made the lady bullfighter cry in the film Talk to Her. Because of this melancholy soundtrack, a series of images flashed through my mind as I read about Detroit’s internationally renowned museum: Frida Kahlo losing her leg. Frida Kahlo’s sister shooting morphine into her arm. Frida Kahlo kissing her husband Diego one last time and bursting into funereal flames.

It doesn’t seem, however, that it’s just me projecting a series of depressing scenes onto Detroit. In all the articles, each of the writers uses an almost obligatorily blue palette when describing the city. According to Holland Cotter at the New York Times, Detroit is “spirited but depressed,” one of “our ailing cities,” known for “dust and vacancy,” with “little commercial energy.” In a place like this, Cotter notes, art is a “glittering bauble” (I had to look that up: a bauble is a showy and useless thing). For Ellen McCarthy of the Washington Post, the city holds beauty, but she calls it “gritty and romantic,” “idle and empty,” and in some places sad enough to prompt her friend to note “It looks like a nuclear bomb went off.”

It is perhaps no wonder that when I surf through them, all of the paintings in the online catalogue for the museum seem to echo misery: “Still Life with Fallen Candles,” “Shadow Country,” “Melancholy Woman,” “Donkey.”

Luckily, I have other resources for learning about this place. My father, who is visiting family in Detroit right now, calls to report on his renewed adoration for the city almost every day.

Last week when the phone rang, my dad’s voice didn’t even wait for a hello. It said: “I. Just. Had. The. Greatest. Day.”

The story went like this: my father has always been a fan of my great aunt Betty. She is not his aunt, but his aunt-in-law: 94 and sharp as a knife. They are a funny pair. Even though she is from an immigrant Italian family and he a working class black one, they grew up within blocks of each other. She grew up on Seneca, and my father spends his time on Seminole: both streets are in a historical neighborhood named in honor of Native American tribes. She lives in a wealthy suburb now, but it’s a ten-minute car ride from Indian Village. He will bike or drive over when the mood hits, just to say hello.

On the “greatest day,” the two of them took a field trip together to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the Richard Avedon exhibition. At the show, the walls are lined with images of thin, beautiful women wearing bizarre uniforms dreamed up by the fashion world’s creative geniuses. Richard Avedon has been celebrated for incorporating models of various ethnic backgrounds into the world of high fashion. Because my father is a photographer and my mother is a pattern maker, there is something especially touching about this outing: a middle aged black artist is taking his wife’s elderly white aunt on a tour of the cosmopolitan world they left Detroit in order to explore.

One model in particular, named Donyale Luna, was born in Detroit. In a stark, black and white photo, she stands with sandal straps criss-crossing up her dark legs like ribbon; metallic rectangles shimmy and shimmer on her torso, reflecting neat little flashes of light and shadow; one elbow points at the ceiling, while her face lifts up and to the side, her cheek lit like a waning crescent moon. She is a skyscraper—a gesture of modernity. Though she left it for New York and Europe, her roots are in the city outside the museum; the one that, in its heyday, served as the very definition for the word modernity.

After seeing the show, my dad and great aunt realize that it’s late. They are hungry. So they go to the museum restaurant for a light dinner, in the same cafeteria where my young, dating parents used to go for tea when they worked at the library across the street.

The Detroit Museum of Art is majestic, and the silhouettes of my father and great aunt eating must have been minuscule in comparison to the building that surrounded them. The DIA was designed by Paul Cret, an architect who brought a Beaux-Arts, Italian Renaissance style to federal buildings in many American cities. The walls of the interior courtyard boast frescoes painted by Diego Rivera. Multi-colored hands in various stages of clutching and opening are raised like a bouquet toward the ceiling in a manner reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. The slithering, silver pipes and wheels of factory equipment twist and wind around the bodies of working men, as though they are toiling inside the viscera of a steel giant. In a short video shot while he painted the mural, Rivera stands calmly— switching among his seven brushes, working slowly to add shadow to the fingernails of a massive hand, which is larger than Rivera's sizable belly.

In order to do research for this mural, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo spent hours observing and photographing the employees at automobile factories. In the mural, juxtaposed with images of industry are the large, round, nude bodies of women and men; the oval of an unborn baby hovers over the west wall. In the film Frida, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, both crippled, hobble to the top of a Mayan ruin. When he asks how she came to have a limp, she does not say: the pole from a bus entered my body at my pelvis and came out my vagina. She says, “at the end of the day we can endure much more than we think we can." I wonder what she, Trotsky and Rivera would say about the fact that Detroit, potent enough at one time to inspire such a grandiose fresco, has become the city of which America is most ashamed.

Aware of Detroit's ethnic demographics, the museum has moved the collections of African and African American art, thanks to a 158 million dollar renovation, to more prominent positions. Curators have shifted the tone of captions and informative plaques to meet the needs of an audience that hasn’t gotten a Ph.D. in art history. Galleries are organized by theme, not chronology, to better cater to the way young minds work.

Newspaper critics roll their eyes in fear that these gestures will “dumb down” the complicated rhetoric of great art. But Frida and Diego worked their whole lives in the name not of the elite, but of the people. Fancy theoretical blah blah is not, after all, the same thing as intelligence.

As they leave the museum, my father and great aunt pass an auditorium teeming with mostly African American children. “What is going on?” my father asks. "We're hosting a chess tournament," a museum employee answers. When my father was young, his teachers told him to stop trying in school and accept his fate as a plumber. It’s hard for him to fall victim to the tone that the national media uses to describe the city of his birth when he is confronted by scenes like this: a room full of black boys and girls, studying a checkered board, contemplating what move they will make next.