The lecture is June 7, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Chase Robinson, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, comes to talk about Charles Lang Freer: the house he built on East Ferry Street, what he collected inside it, and what he did with that collection.
The title is "Detroit and Charles Lang Freer's Vision for a National Museum." Most people in Detroit don't know this story. That is, according to William Colburn, director of the Freer House at Wayne State University, exactly the problem.
The house has been on East Ferry Street since 1892. Freer hired Wilson Eyre Jr., a Philadelphia architect, and the two worked on the design together. What they built is what preservationists now call Michigan's most significant surviving example of shingle-style architecture. Limestone. Shingles. Nothing that announces itself from the street.
The interior is another matter. Freer brought in four American painters to make original work for the house. Dwight W. Tryon, Thomas W. Dewing, Abbott H. Thayer, and Maria Oakey Dewing produced paintings and decorative paint treatments designed specifically for the rooms. The scheme was built for the house, not assembled after the fact.
Freer was a railroad magnate and, Colburn says, "a major cultural force" in Detroit during his lifetime. His business partner Frank J. Hecker owned an adjacent house at the corner of Ferry and Woodward Avenue. The block dates to the late 19th century. Colburn calls East Ferry Street "just loaded with history and unlike any other in the city." It holds the best surviving examples of Victorian architecture in Detroit, along with landmarks tied to Jewish and African American history.
Colburn has been the Freer House director for 15 years, working to make the case that a significant American cultural story ran through this block. "It's a Detroit story that's untold," he told Hour Detroit.
The story: Freer did not just collect art. He gave it to the Smithsonian. The lecture, as Colburn frames it, is about the vision behind that gift and how a railroad magnate from Detroit shaped what a national museum could be. Robinson now directs the institution that Freer's gift built.
The Freer House is managed by Wayne State University's College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts and sits in the city's Cultural Center, near the DIA.
Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue. June 7, 2026.
