The Detroit Museum of Arts Confronts Art History While Shaping Its Future 

“We have not yet begun to utilize the museum as an instrument of cultural education.” Those words, from Alain Locke’s 1925 essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” carry visitors through a set of newly installed permanent collection galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA).  
 
When he penned that text a century ago, Locke, the eminent philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, spoke on what he viewed as the popular distortion of “the Afric