Detroit's Long, Tangled Relationship Between Art Funding and Detroit Politics

THE DETROIT FREE PRESS
By Mark Stryker

MICHIGAN---For most of its 128-year lifespan the DIA has been entangled within the broad narrative of Detroit’s rise and fall as an economic power and the city’s complex dynamics when it comes to race, class, labor and city-suburbs divide. No American museum has endured such extensive political and financial turmoil. It is a unique story, tied to the museum’s unparalleled municipal relationship and byzantine administrative structure. In 1919, the DIA ceded ownership of its art and building to the City of Detroit. Museum leaders traded financial and managerial independence for the promise of annual funding — except this turned out to be a Faustian bargain that irrevocably linked the DIA to the boom-and-bust cycles of Detroit’s economy and ever-shifting political winds. [link]