Current Exhibitions

Detroit’s rich heritage lies with the men and women who’ve always called Detroit “home,” even as they went on to help shape our nation’s cultural landscape.

We cheered their accomplishments on the field, welcomed them into our lives through television and radio and were thrilled to see them perform on stage. Their championships became our championships and their hit songs formed the soundtracks of our lives.

Origins: Life Where the River Bends is a story of many Detroit beginnings. It invites guests to explore the lives and events that have shaped - and been shaped by - the area on the river now called Detroit. This region’s First People called it Waawiiyaataanong, or “where the river bends,” but it would earn many monikers over the years including “le détroit” and the “Motor City.”

Starting in 2015, the Detroit Historical Society convened diverse groups and communities around the effects of a historic crisis with its Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward project. From the hundreds of oral histories in our archive, the assistance and input of our many partners, and the latest historical scholarship, we have developed the Detroit 67: Perspectives exhibition to allow visitors to better understand the events of July 1967, what led up to them, where we are today, and how to connect to efforts moving Detroit forward

The Gothic Room in the Polk Family Hall is the first exhibit you enter when coming into the Dossin Great Lakes Museum.  Stepping through its doors is like stepping back in time inside the reconstructed gentleman’s lounge of the City of Detroit III, with a window on the right side of the gallery set up as if you’re looking out at the Detroit shore line in the early 1900s.

Adjacent to the Allesee Gallery of Culture, visitors find the Motor City Music exhibition — an interactive, participatory space that explores the rich legacy of Detroit’s music from Gospel to Motown and all things in between.

The S.S. William Clay Ford, a Great Lakes freighter, was scrapped in 1987 and its pilot house was brought to the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. 

The Detroit Historical Society is home to one of the largest collections of Great Lakes ship models in the country. Most of the more than 150 models are five or six decades old, while at least one dates to 1854. The ship models represent over 300 years of North American fresh water maritime history. In many cases, the models themselves are historic; in other cases they represent significant examples of technological advances that powered social and economic aspects of the region’s history.

Miss Pepsi, the fastest hydroplane in the Detroit River in its time, was perhaps the most famous symbol of a family that made their livelihood distributing nationally famous soft drinks to Detroiters and residents of the region. The company was Dossin’s Food Products.