The DIA and the Rivera Murals That Belong to Everyone

The Detroit Institute of Arts at 5200 Woodward Avenue is one of the great encyclopedic art museums in the United States, and it nearly lost its entire collection in 2013 when the city's bankruptcy threatened to liquidate the art to pay creditors. The citizens of three surrounding counties voted to fund the museum with a property tax millage, and the DIA survived — a decision that said more about Detroit's character than any comeback narrative ever could.

The Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Murals occupy the museum's central courtyard and are the reason most people come. Rivera painted them in 1932-33, and the 27 panels cover every wall of the garden court with a vision of Detroit's automotive industry that is simultaneously a celebration of human labor and a warning about its mechanization. The murals are enormous — the figures life-sized, the machinery monumental — and standing in the center of the room and turning slowly, surrounded by Rivera's vision of workers and machines and the chemical processes that powered the century, is one of the most overwhelming experiences any American museum offers.

Beyond Rivera, the DIA is deep: Van Gogh, Rembrandt, a Bruegel, one of the finest collections of African-American art in the country, and a suit of armor gallery that children love and adults find unexpectedly beautiful. The building — Beaux-Arts outside, modern galleries inside — has the proportions of a museum that was built to serve a wealthy city and now serves a different city with the same generosity.

What visitors miss: The General Motors Center for African American Art on the museum's lower level. It's one of the few dedicated spaces for Black art in a major American museum, and the collection — from quilts to contemporary painting — tells a Detroit story that the Rivera murals, for all their brilliance, do not: the story of the Black workers who built the cars, raised the families, and made the music that gave the city its other name.