The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is launching a three-year, $3.7m initiative to expand its collection of work by African-American artists. Its first purchase is David Hammons’s Bird (1990), a basketball covered in chicken wire and suspended from a birdcage frame. The sculpture—which represents a significant portion of the museum’s entire annual acquisitions budget, according to the Detroit Free Press—is expected to go on show this autumn. (A spokeswoman for the museum declined to comment on the price.)
The initiative is a priority for the museum’s new director Salvador Salort-Pons, who started at the DIA as a curator in 2008. Valerie Mercer, the curator of contemporary African-American art at the museum since 2001, will oversee acquisitions, exhibitions and public programmes.
The Spanish-born director hopes the initiative will help expand the museum’s audience. “Twenty-two per cent of Detroiters are African-American, while only 10% of the DIA’s general attendance is African-American,” he says. The initiative, partly funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will also introduce paid internships designed to “pipeline African-Americans into museum fields, where they are significantly under-represented”, he says.