Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies is the first comprehensive museum retrospective of the visionary Detroit artist, storyteller, and cultural historian behind the MBAD African Bead Museum. Spanning forty-five years of practice, the exhibition brings together dozens of previously unseen works—including paintings, collages, sculptures, works on paper, and public art—that fuse African symbology, African American history, and Detroit’s industrial landscape into a language of resilience and collective memory. More than a survey, the presentation transforms MOCAD into a layered environment echoing Dabls’s celebrated community-based practice: monumental installations, such as his nkisi-inspired Iron Teaches Rocks How to Rust series, reinterpret discarded industrial materials—iron, glass, rock, and mirror—into forms of spiritual, historical, and cultural continuity.

Throughout his career, from works created during his tenure at The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History to the immersive outdoor installations at MBAD, Dabls collapses boundaries between art, education, ritual, and community-building. Detroit Cosmologies reframes how museums can hold history and cultural memory, presenting Dabls as artist, archivist, and philosopher, and inviting visitors to experience Detroit itself as a cosmological, living landscape of memory, invention, and ongoing cultural renewal.

Carole Harris: This Side of the River, offers a sweeping survey of the Detroit fiber artist whose quilting and textile work has transformed the field for more than five decades. Known for her improvisational compositions, layered surfaces, and rhythmic abstractions, Harris’s work reflects Detroit’s evolving cultural landscape. This exhibition traces Harris’s trajectory from her early years at Gallery 7 where she had her first solo exhibition in 1977, to her most recent explorations in deconstruction, color, and spatial complexity. Archival materials related to Gallery 7 and to Detroit’s Black artistic networks of the 1970s–1990s will contextualize Harris’s contributions within a broader regional lineage that continues to shape contemporary art in the city.

The season also presents the first solo museum exhibition of Martha Mysko. Co-Head of the Painting Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Mysko’s immersive installations and assemblages, built from salvaged, secondhand, and thrifted materials collected across Detroit, engage with domesticity, memory, and transformation. Martha Mysko: Retail Therapy will offer an expansive view of Mysko’s practice and introduce a series of new, site-responsive installations that examine the emotional and cultural residues embedded within everyday materials, illuminating Detroit as a landscape of both resourcefulness and reinvention. 

To stay informed about the current Mobile Homestead exhibition, Mary Ann Monforton: Heart Land, and reopening plans, please visit mocadetroit.org or follow MOCAD on social media @mocadetroit.

ABOUT OLAYAMI DABLS
Olayami Dabls (b. 1948, Canton, MS) is the founder and curator of the MBAD African Bead Museum and Dabls African Bead Gallery in Detroit, Michigan. He established the museum to return art to its original purpose in African culture: not for entertainment or profit, but as a tool for emotional and cultural healing. Located at the intersection of Grand River and West Grand Boulevard, the museum and its surrounding installations invite visitors to explore the deep connections between material, memory, and identity.

Dabls’s practice, grounded in education and community engagement, reflects his belief that art can help restore balance and understanding. His murals across Detroit extend this vision, including a piece in Eastern Market depicting African women during enslavement and colonization, and another at Grand River and Warren that uses symbolic materials and imagery of snakes; ancient symbols of transformation and resilience.

In the 1970s, Dabls worked at the Afro-American Museum (now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History), where he began questioning why African art and symbols were often viewed with fear. Confronting this legacy of colonization, he devoted himself to studying African material culture, ultimately founding MBAD in 1994 as a space to share art through an African-centered lens of history, spirit, and healing.

ABOUT CAROLE HARRIS
Carole Harris (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Harris has exhibited across the United States, in Michigan, and internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI); The River Gallery (Chattanooga, TN); National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH); and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Harris’ work has been published in numerous books, and her work has been reviewed by several newspapers and magazines. Carole Harris’ work was included in The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America, which toured China in 2012, where she was a guest lecturer. In 2017 her work was included in Footworks at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in France. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited and published extensively, including a two-person exhibition Repetition, Rhythm, and Vocab with artist Allie McGhee at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 2018, a solo exhibition at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan in 2017, and a solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center in 2019. Her work was included in the exhibition Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2019. In 2015 Carole Harris was awarded a Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.

ABOUT MARTHA MYSKO
Martha Mysko (b. 1982, Baltimore, MD) is an artist whose color-saturated works explore consumerism, class, taste, value, and material culture through the language of painting. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2011), where she is currently Artist in Residence and co-Head of the Painting Department. Mysko has presented solo exhibitions at Belle Isle Viewing Room, Wasserman Projects, Marc Straus Gallery, Good Weather Gallery, and Sadie Halie Projects, among others. Her work has been featured in Nylon Magazine and Artforum, and included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum, Library Street Collective, Reyes Finn Gallery, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

ABOUT MOCAD
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide. 

CONTACT
Carolina Adams
Sutton Communications
mocad@suttoncomms.com