Detroit Institute of Arts

Founded in 1885, the Detroit Institute of Arts moved to its current Beaux-Arts building in 1927, when Detroit was the auto industry capital of the world. One of the best-known works in its collection, Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s modernist “Detroit Industry” fresco cycle (1932-1933), was created for the museum shortly thereafter. Famous for the breadth of its collection, the DIA established a special curatorial department in 2000 charged with expanding its collection of African American art. In 2014, a federal bankruptcy plan for the ailing city saved DIA’s collection—rumored to be worth more than a billion dollars—from being auctioned off to help pay the city’s debt, ensuring that such masterpieces as Jan van Eyck’s luminous painting Saint Jerome in his Study (c. 1435) and John Sloan’s plainspoken canvas McSorley’s Bar (1912) remain on view.