Graham Beal
Graham Beal, who has overseen the Detroit Institute of Arts during rocky times, will step down as director when his contract expires June 30, the Detroit Free Press writes.
Mark Stryker reports:
Yet Beal's 16-year tenure as director of the Detroit Institute of Arts — highlighted by a landmark $158-million renovation and reinstallation of the collection — has transformed the museum into a populist institution embraced by a larger and more diverse swath of Detroiters than at any other point in its 130-year history.
The DIA has also stabilized its finances for the first time in decades and launched an endowment drive that, if successful, promises to solve once and for all the chronic budget problems that date back more than a century.
Beal has done all of this while calmly leading the DIA through a series of existential crises — from the financial crash of 2008 to the city's bankruptcy — that might have left others waving a white flag of surrender.
