Detroit’s MOCAD Reopens with a New Vision and a New Kind of Leadership

The creation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) has been a slow and steady one. First conceptualized in 1995 by a trio of women, it took over 10 years of grassroots development before opening its doors to the public in 2006. This spring, the institution marks its 20th anniversary, reopening after an eight-month renovation and a new vision for its future.

At the core of this vision is ensuring that artists are at the center of everything the museum does. “Artists will always exist; institutions maybe won’t always exist,” said Jova Lynne, MOCAD’s artistic director who serves as co-director with Marie Madison-Patton, the chief operating officer. “Putting artists at the forefront and acknowledging the multiplicitous lives that are lived is a cornerstone to what we are doing for this 20th year at MOCAD.”

Lynne and Madison-Patton have given MOCAD’s new chapter a title: “A Practice of Multiplicity.” Lynne described this approach as focused on “uplifting the wholeness of the artist and what they bring to the institution and their communities. We accept artists as they are, not just how the art world allows them to exist.” For them, that means being realistic that artists can also have full-time jobs, are raising children, and are caring for their family or other members of their community. “That all goes into the work,” Lynne added.

Community is also key to the just-completed renovation, which focused primarily on much-needed infrastructural updates, including adding an HVAC system, to make its home, a former auto dealership, more hospitable to the art on view and visitors coming in. But, this redesign, which opened in April, also focuses on making MOCAD an even more welcoming space for the local community. Near the entrance is a new Learning Studio that aims to make its educational offerings more accessible. The café has been transformed into a multi-use space for programming and community events. And its facade now opens up to the street, bringing the building more fully into the surrounding neighborhood.

Because MOCAD is a non-collecting institution, its programming prioritizes artists whose practices create space for dialogue. These concerns are at the core of the pair of surveys that inaugurate the reopened MOCAD, which highlight the individual practices of Olayami Dabls and Carol Harris, two Detroit artists who have shaped the city’s creative landscape.

“Carol Harris: This Side of the River” traces the evolving spirit of Detroit, through the economic turmoil and now steady resurgence.  The artist describes her practice as “material archeology” that combines her work as an interior designer with her career as fiber artist whose art weaves together the history, culture, and transformation of the city within the lineage of Black abstraction and quilting.

A cultural historian and storyteller, Olayami Dabls has offered his Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum as a site for community connection and collective remembrance for over 40 years. His work preserving the public history of Detroit has inspired generations of artists and community organizers working to continue the legacy of innovation within the city. “Detroit Cosmologies,” the first comprehensive survey of his work, reimagines the museum within a long tradition of spiritual and collective healing.  “We believe art has the power to transform people and their communities and is an incredible tool for nurturing social change,” Madison-Patton said of the work on view.

Rooted in community, care, and experimentation, the museum was born out of a shared desire to fill a gap in the city’s cultural scene. At first, the three founders—art critic Marsha Miro, dealer Susanne Feld Hilberry, and photographer Julia Reyes Taubman—envisioned creating an institution that would operate as an extension of the Detroit Institute of Arts that focused on alternative exhibition programming. Difficulties in fundraising and wavering institutional support led them to establish an independent space, located in a former auto dealership.

“One of our mandates from the very beginning was that we become part of the community—to be a museum of the people who live here as part of the life of the city, not just a separate, more grand, classical encyclopedic museum,” Miro told ARTnews during the reopening. “That has always been our mission: to bring people in, make them feel comfortable, and do shows with local, national, and international artists.”

Curated by the late Klaus Kertess, the inaugural exhibition, “Meditations in an Emergency” exemplified that approach. Titled after a Frank O’Hara poem, it featured artists like Nari Ward, Mark Bradford, Barry McGee, Paul Pfeiffer, and Kara Walker, alongside local Christopher Fachini and Japanese artist Tabaimo.

Other exhibitions over the past decade have shown the institution’s focus on cross-cultural and intergenerational connection with Detroit serving as the entry point for a global discourse. These include the permanent installation of Detroit native Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in 2010 on its grounds or “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” a collaboration between Hank Willis Thomas and Songha & Company that served “as a living monument [to] the lives of people lost due to the ongoing Gun Violence epidemic within the United States,” according to an exhibition description.

Lynne and Madison-Patton see their roles as co-directors as a continuation of the women-led, collaborative model initiated by the museum’s founders. One of only a handful of arts institutions in the US operating under such a model, they see their partnership as a way to defy traditional museum conventions in order to bring the margins to the center.

“The beauty of shared leadership,” Lynne said, “is that it embraces the spirit of collaboration—that emboldened accountability between us, our team, and the broader institution and community. In this structure, you are able to do so much more when the responsibilities are shared.” Madison-Patton added, “It gives us the opportunity to focus on our expertise and then come together to make the best decisions for the institution and our community.”

For Lynne, that expertise relies on also being a practicing artist, and she allows the mutual understanding between artists to guide the organization’s artistic direction. “I understand so deeply and intimately what it means to have a practice and what it means to be in process,” she said. “This work requires time, thought, and care—which is not always afforded.”

A guiding principle for MOCAD’s operations is to meet people where they are, updating the vision of civic-centered arts institution to one that includes generative care, creative inquiry, and commitment to community. “What is so special about Detroit and the community MOCAD is trying to foster is that our understanding of community more so operates as an ameba—it’s not just one little section,” Lynne said. “Our connectivity and initiatives keep growing and proliferating.”