One day in the 1970s, a large box arrived at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit, now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. A benefactor had shipped his collection of African masks to the museum. Olayami Dabls worked there as curator.

“When we opened the box, people were afraid to deal with the content,” Dabls (b. 1948) told me in a phone interview. “I'm like, ‘Why am I afraid of looking at my ancestors’ material culture? Why is this frightening me?’ And why is everyone here frightened of what was in the box?”

The question sent Dabls, who had studied African material culture–masks, shields, jewelry, clothing, etc.–down a rabbit hole to an unexpected source.

“What I came up with was the early days of Hollywood, most of the horror movies, the backdrop was African material culture. This art had been associated with horror movies, anything that would frighten you,” Dabls explained. He kept digging. “Then I ran across another article talking about Haiti and the Voodoo doll and doing that research, I discovered there were no Voodoo dolls in Haiti; that came out of Hollywood.”

Witchcraft and sticking pins in dolls to make people feel pain. Show biz.

“There is a sculpture piece you may find in Haiti, but mainly in Africa, called an nkisi doll, which comes from the Cameroon people,” Dabls said. “They would take a sculpture piece and carve it and place nails in it; whenever they wanted something good to happen to people, they used the nail. My question was, ‘Why was the nail used as opposed to something else?’ Because iron–we got enough iron in us to make a three inch nail. The way iron came to the community, it came as something that improved the quality of life you had.”

Nkisi power figures as Voodoo black magic. Ceremonial masks as horror movie props. “The Dark Continent.” Spooky. Dangerous.

“The whole system was designed to turn people against their traditional ways of doing things, and the best way you can do that is to make that negative,” Dabls said. “Lies have a real purpose of keeping you from connecting with who you are.”

Dabls had studied African material culture. The objects. The makers. The bad vibes he felt opening that box sent him on a long path of inquiry into the meaning of those items. Their purpose. Their perception around the world. Those insights and his remarkable work in the decades following as artist, storyteller, cultural historian, and civic champion come together at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit which presents “Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies” his first comprehensive museum retrospective, April 25 through July 12, 2026.

African Art–Or Is It?

In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote perhaps the 20th century’s most provocative essay about art entitled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” That notion is ridiculous, of course. Nochlin’s point was that if a person only read popular art history textbooks or biographies or went to museums, they might come away thinking there were no great women artists because male artists near exclusively occupied those spaces. Because men were the curators, collectors, authors, historians, and museum directors. There were no great women artists because men had omitted them from the story.

A similar situation existed for Africa, with white supremacy replacing misogyny as the root cause.

“The first African art did not exist because (Africans) use what we perceive and know as art as material culture to deal with everyday issues and initiation rituals and rites of passage,” Dabls explained. “There was no country in Africa referring to (material culture) as ‘African art.’ Those were titles placed on it by the people who were doing the research and reporting on it.”

The white people from Europe writing the books and deciding what was “art,” what belonged in textbooks and museums, and what was… something else. Call it material culture, call it ethnography, call it folk, call it craft, call it what you will, just don’t call it “art.”

“There were terms they were using which separated (African) artists from the rest of the artists on the planet, and they were called ‘fine artists,’ not realizing at the time that was a term of supremacy. It means that if you are not classified as a ‘fine artist,’ then you are anything, but,” Dabls came to understand.

Same as with Native Americans and Indigenous people around the world. These people didn’t refer to their creativity or cultural objects as “art” because they didn’t have a word comparable to how English speakers use “art,” as something separate from everyday life. The incredibly artful, spectacularly creative, and masterfully crafted garments and jewelry and pottery and baskets and carvings produced for centuries across Africa, across North and South America, across Oceana, were a feature of everyday life. Not separate. Not “art,” whatever that means.

“There were about 52 countries in Africa and subgroups, and no one referred to themselves as an artist,” Dabls discovered during his research. “It would be a long stretch to run across one word that represented art to them. They had other titles. None was artist. They were mainly people who represented certain aspects of the community.”

What “art” meant to the gatekeepers, the professors and curators in London and Paris and later New York, meant white and male and painting and sculpture and descended from Greece and Rome. Narrowly.

“The people in charge were using these terms to justify that there were no African artists because we didn't do the (formal) training, so therefore you couldn't be an artist,” Dabls said. “I don't think they were aware that Picasso and his crew had changed that whole idea about what constitutes art.”

Interest in African material culture among early 20^th century artists working in Paris, Picasso most prominently among them, began shifting ideas about what constitutes art. His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and its obvious substitution of African masks for the women’s faces made clear that Europe’s elite “fine artists” were influenced by and borrowed from African–say it–art.

A century later, Indigenous material culture throughout the world has finally gained complete acceptance as “art.”

African Beads

Dabls worked at the Afro-American Museum for about 15 years before pursuing his own projects. That museum began hosting an African world festival in the 80s. A vendor at one of these events changed his life.

“I walked up to this table and all this man had was beads. He had beads around his neck. I said, ‘How much you want for that strand you got on?’ He felt offended. He said, ‘Where I'm from, people do not ask to buy things that you're wearing.’ I said, ‘Where I'm from, they say, everything has a price,’” Dabls recalled. “I could see I was irritating him. He's trying to give me some serious information and I'm here playing games with him. Then he said, ‘My brother, let me explain to you, these beads have been in my family for five generations.’ He got my attention because I'm into history, but he really slapped me upside the face when I realized it was oral history.”

Oral history. Another tradition of Indigenous cultures across the world. Another aspect of their cultures dismissed by Europeans because it wasn’t written down. That’s the only “real” history according to the colonizer.

“Oral history is delivered the same way we talk about history in this country. After listening to him, I realized (oral history) doesn't have the same rules. He was telling me about his cousin received these beads for this and that, and I said wow man, I'm in the middle of being taught oral history,” Dabls said. “The beads didn't come across as adornment anymore. So, I had been duped again. All these books have the term ‘adornment.’ In fact, every one that has African material in it, when someone is dressed up, they call it adornment. Adornment on this side of the planet is something to make you look good.”

Beads in Africa were more than simple “adornment.” More than a fashion accessory. This revelation sent Dabls on a quest that would consume the remainder of his life, a quest for beads.

“I started buying the beads and once I started buying the beads, there were people who were stopping me at my gallery from all over Africa, saying that their friends said that I got beads,” he explained.

Dabls used beads as an accessible “doorway” introducing people to African material culture.

Today, Dabls is best known for starting the MBAD African Bead Museum and Dabls African Bead Gallery, side-by-side in Detroit. “MBAD” refers to the first initial in the names of Dabls’ four children. 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.

“Most people come in this store who have never been here before, but who are practicing some kind of other spirituality, the first thing they ask me is, ‘Is this a voodoo shop,’” Dabls said. “I say, ‘No, it's across the street.’ There's a big church across the street from me. If you are a suppressed people, all aspects of your existence have been tainted against you.”

Another chance encounter at the bead gallery would deepen Dabls’ appreciation for the items.

“One day, some professor came in, he said, ‘Man, do you know what you're doing?’ ‘I have no idea what I'm doing. Educate me,’” Dabls remembers. “He said beads have been around 30,000 years, and there's not a culture on this planet that has not had beads as a central part of their culture.”

Another piece of the puzzle went into place.

‘Detroit Cosmologies’

Spanning 45 years of practice, “Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies” brings together dozens of previously unseen works—including paintings, collages, sculptures, works on paper, and public art—fusing African symbology, African American history, and Detroit’s industrial landscape into a language of resilience and collective memory.

The presentation transforms MOCAD into a layered environment echoing Dabls’ celebrated community-based practice—the art environment he’s created since the early 2000s on the corner of West Grand Boulevard and Grand River. Tours are available.

“I needed something to attract people who were moving up and down the street; that's when my art became used for something that was important, other than painting something someone could put on top of their couch,” Dabls said. “I painted this installation with various symbols from Africa. That took off. The area that I'm in, at that time, was considered a very dangerous area, but I started painting these patterns on these buildings, and all of a sudden, this place became sacred. It’s one of the few things that we could just leave out in the open, and people would not do anything, but protect it.”

The city block of outdoor installations became a space for his community to understand the immense power of its African heritage.

MOCAD’s spring season begins a year-long arc of exhibitions and programs foregrounding the artists, traditions, and intergenerational narratives inspired by the city’s creative landscape. “Detroit Cosmologies” invites visitors to experience Detroit itself as a cosmological, living landscape of memory, invention, and ongoing cultural renewal.

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