Olayami Dabls: Grand Vision

Born in 1948 in Canton, Mississippi, Olayami Dabls is a storyteller, artist, curator, educator, and mentor. He is the founder of the MBAD African Bead Museum and outdoor public art installation at the intersection of Grand River Avenue and West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, the city where he has lived for over 60 years, working on the MBAD African Bead Museum for more than 40 of them.

Through material culture, Dabls presents visual commentary, from the past into the future, with the understanding that generations of African and African American ancestors used visual materials to convey information about their experiences as well as send messages for healing and protection.

Dabls reaffirms that art and art spaces in the traditions of African and African American culture hold the power to heal and to restore. Like the N’kisi carved figures from the Congo in Central Africa that have long inspired Dabls and informed his practice, art can be a vessel for the human spirit, a dwelling, a refuge, a container for the divine.

Working with reclaimed, discarded, and natural found materials, Dabls transforms the remnants of Detroit’s industrial landscape into works that honor African cultural memory, resilience, and renewal. His constructions are exuberant expressions of creativity and imagination, a life’s force. They are works that feel as much about place as the passing of time, a continual transformation—through tending, repainting, repairing, and revival, the work remains alive and continues to evolve.

To visit the MBAD African Bead Museum and outdoor sculpture garden is transformative. Dabls transports us to worlds light years beyond any walls. For decades he has reimagined and set in motion what a museum space can be, free from the underpinnings of colonialism and the Western white frame.

Grand Vision, currently on view in the Institute Gallery, presents Dabls’ paintings along with African Trade Beads, carved N’kisi figures from Dabls’ collections, and personal ephemera chronicling the artist’s own storied career. With a unique combination of wisdom and mysticism, symbols and signs, colors and patterns, and a multiplicity of mirrors, Dabls tells an infinite tale of regeneration.

As part of the Institute project, Dabls’ iconic outdoor sculpture Iron Teaching Rocks Table Manners will be exhibited on the U-M campus grounds at the corner of State Street and South University, near UMMA and in close proximity to landmark U-M public sculptures.

Iron Teaching Rocks Table Manners resembles a birthday party, with promises of layer cake and favors. It is a metaphor for assimilation ... the pressures placed on African Americans and other cultures to learn and practice the customs and manners of “civilized” Western society, and often unmet promises, “let them eat cake,” of the American dream. At the same time, it is a celebration of resilience, and all the unexpected and marvelous ways we come together in community.

—Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities Curator

Olayami Dabls is the 2026 William and Sally Searle Visiting Artist.

Olayami Dabls will be present in the gallery for conversation on the following dates: October 9, 12, and 23, 2026 from 11am to 3pm.

Dabls’ public sculpture Iron Teaching Rocks Table Manners will be on view at the corner of South University and State Street, September 17–October 11, 2026.

Detroit artist Olayami Dabls is a storyteller, curator, educator, mentor, and placemaker. He is the founder of the MBAD African Bead Museum. Through material culture, Dabls presents stories about the past, present, and future from African and African-American perspectives. In 2022, he received the prestigious Kresge Eminent Artist award for his innovative practice and legacy within his community and beyond.