Detroit's electronic music museum still needs a home

The Museum of Detroit Electronic Music does not have a building yet. Its founder and executive director, Adriel Thornton, said as much in a televised interview as the city's flagship techno weekend got underway.

Thornton sat down with Stephen Henderson on Detroit PBS for American Black Journal, in an episode that aired May 20 and frames MODEM as a project still coming together. The conversation landed in the same stretch as Movement, the festival that has run more than 115 artists through Hart Plaza over Memorial Day weekend this year, per the festival's own lineup. The timing made the museum's central question hard to ignore. The music that built a global scene started here, and the city that produced it still has no dedicated place to tell that story.

MODEM stands for Museum of Detroit Electronic Music. By its own description, the institution is committed to preserving, honoring and promoting Detroit's heritage as the origin of techno and hip-hop culture. The plan is a permanent home that collects recordings, photographs and objects, documents the artists and producers who shaped the sound, and runs exhibitions and education programming rather than a temporary display inside someone else's building.

The reason the museum is searching at all is a deal that fell through. MODEM had been slated to anchor a redevelopment of part of the former Packard Plant, the Albert Kahn-designed ruin on the east side that developers wanted to turn into housing, a skate park and the museum. That plan died in late March. Mayor Mary Sheffield's administration terminated negotiations with the developers after a letter of intent lapsed, according to the Detroit News, freeing the city to weigh other uses for one of its largest contiguous publicly owned sites. The cancellation took MODEM's expected address with it.

Thornton's framing in the broadcast is that the setback does not touch the museum itself. He described MODEM as part of a project that got canceled, not a project that was canceled, and said the team is now looking for a place that is more central and makes more sense. He told Henderson the group is actively pursuing sponsors and foundation support, with an online fundraising push planned to follow.

The pitch underneath all of it is a correction. Techno was not imported into Detroit. It was built by Black teenagers in the city who reached for synthesizers and drum machines as the industrial economy around them contracted, and the sound they made traveled to Chicago, London and Berlin and kept going. Thornton's point on the broadcast was direct: the genre created here by African American teenagers has impacted the world. A museum in Detroit, telling that story in Detroit, reads differently than the footnote version told everywhere else.

For now there is no site and no opening date. The festival comes down at Hart Plaza this week, the PA stacks get trucked out, and the museum meant to outlast all of it is still looking for a room.