In celebration of Dia de Muertos, the Detroit Institute of Arts, in partnership with Detroit's Mexican Consulate, invite you to explore a community exhibition of ofrenda altars. In Mexico, and other Latin American countries, the Day of the Dead is the time of the year to celebrate the lives of close relatives, friends or community members who have passed away.

Objects important to lost loved ones, such as favorites foods, drinks, mementos and pictures, are collected and incorporated into elaborate displays that include pan de muerto (bread of the dead), sugar skulls, candles, flowers, papel picado (paper cutouts) and other decorations. Ofrendas: Celebrating el Día de Muertos is on view during regular museum hours and is included with general museum admission. Visit in person or online below.

En celebración del Día de Muertos, El Instituto de Artes de Detroit en colaboración con el Consulado de México en Detroit te invita a explorar una exposición comunitaria de ofrendas. En México y otros países latinoamericanos, el Día de Muertos es una época del año en la que se celebran las vidas de familiares cercanos, amigos o miembros de la comunidad que han fallecido.

Para ello, se recolectan y exponen objetos importantes para el fallecido, como comidas y bebidas favoritas, recuerdos y fotos. Los altares incluyen pan de muerto, calaveritas de azúcar, velas, flores papel picado y otras decoraciones. Ofrendas: Celebrating el Día de Muertos se presenta durante nuestros horarios regulares y esta incluida en el boleto de admisión general. Visita en persona o en línea abajo.

Free with general admission

Starting in the sixteenth-century, Flemish and Dutch artists turned to everyday subjects, describing the landscape and people around them with humor and loving detail. This exhibition from the DIA collection will include more than seventy works on paper, highlighting prints by Pieter Bruegel I, Hendrick Goltzius, and Rembrandt van Rijn, as well as drawings by Bartolomeus Breenbergh and Esias van de Velde.

The DIA welcomes three important works by Frida Kahlo (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) and Salvador Dalí (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing), presented alongside photographs from the DIA’s collection, documenting the artists’ imaginative, larger-than-life personae.

The presentation of Kahlo’s contribution to female self-portraiture and Dalí’s engagement with illusionistic image will be located immediately adjacent to Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals (1932–33). It will explore how the two iconic artists produced their own forms of expression, creating surrealist worlds of subjectivity, myth, dream, mirage and magic.

The Detroit Institute of Arts will present a dossier exhibition featuring two masterworks of French eighteenth-century portrait sculpture lent from the Musée du Louvre. Created by the greatest sculptor of the Enlightenment, Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828), the portraits depict two of America’s most iconic founders, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

As Guests of Honor, the portraits will be displayed in the company of selected works that similarly depict Franklin, Washington, and Robert Fulton, another early American icon, as among the first to reach celebrity status as enlightened leaders of a new nation. Drawing from the DIA's own holdings and the important loans from the Louvre, the exhibition gives audiences a unique opportunity to explore and compare images of these very familiar personae through art in a wide variety of media.

Presented in our gallery dedicated to the early American republic, the exhibition sets Houdon’s masterful terracotta portraits alongside painting, sculpture, textile, and work on paper, with significant examples of furniture and decorative arts already on view in the gallery providing a greater context of visual culture in the early American republic.