The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) will present "Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies," the first comprehensive museum retrospective for Detroit artist Olayami Dabls, running from April 25 to July 12, 2026. Dabls, who began his career as a curator at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit (now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History), traces his artistic journey to a transformative moment in the 1970s when he opened a box of African masks that his colleagues feared to handle. This experience led him to investigate how Hollywood and popular culture had demonized African material culture, associating it with horror movies and voodoo, and inspired decades of work as an artist, storyteller, cultural historian, and civic champion.
This retrospective matters because it corrects a long-standing omission in art history, paralleling Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" by challenging the Western framing of African material culture as "art" and exposing the role of white supremacy in shaping art narratives. Dabls' work reclaims the meaning and purpose of African objects, which he argues were never called "art" in Africa but were functional items for daily life and rituals. The exhibition at MOCAD brings overdue institutional recognition to a Detroit artist who has spent decades decolonizing perceptions of African heritage and connecting communities to their ancestral traditions.