Mirrors, iron, wood, rock, and beads make up the artwork you've walked into, the MBAD African Bead Museum. The MBAD African Bead Museum was founded by the artist and storyteller Olayami Dabls, who once served as artist-in-residence at the Charles H. Wright Museum. Across a cluster of buildings and lots near Grand River Avenue, he created a sprawling outdoor environment, walls studded with broken mirror and embedded with African beads, sculptural installations built from salvaged materials, each piece tied to stories drawn from African heritage and the African American experience.
Inside, the museum holds tens of thousands of trade beads, objects that once moved along ancient routes and, painfully, through the trade in enslaved people. Dabls built it slowly by hand over decades, turning a forgotten corner of the west side into a destination known well beyond the city. Walk among the mirrored walls and iron forms and let the glinting beadwork catch the light, an entire history told in glass, stone, and color.