The Arab American National Museum

Contents

1. The building
2. Origins in a social services agency
3. Opening in May 2005
4. The core exhibits
5. The library and the collections
6. National recognition
7. Exhibitions, music and gatherings
8. Closure and reopening
9. What the museum cannot do

Mike Kobeissi came to the United States at 18, and he was born and raised in Lebanon; the Arab American National Museum is the building that sets out to document the history of people who made that crossing. It stands on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan, a building crowned by a dome, with a facade of repeating tile patterns. Inside, visitors pass through a tiled foyer to galleries on several floors, a central atrium and a research library. The museum opened in 2005 as the first devoted to Arab American history, and its building was designed to say something before a single exhibit is read.

The building

History Hit’s guide to the museum explains that the design emulates the domed tops of mosques and that its tile patterned facade mimics the tile work of Arab architecture; it puts the construction cost at $15 million, funded by Chrysler, the Rockefeller Foundation, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.⁶ NPR, reporting on the opening, gave the figure as $16 million.¹ The Detroit News described it in 2022 as a 43,000 square foot museum, the first and only one of its kind in the country devoted to the Arab American experience.³ A Detroit Free Press gallery for the tenth anniversary shows the dome from inside and a newer annex beside the original building.⁴

Origins in a social services agency

The museum did not begin as a museum. It grew out of a cultural arts program at ACCESS, the Arab American social services agency in Dearborn, and its organizers were one year into raising money for the Michigan Avenue building when the attacks of September 11, 2001 struck, The Detroit News recounted in 2016.² The paper notes that the museum launched four years after the attacks with a tiny budget and a limited staff. Rather than ending the project, staff later said, the attacks galvanized the community to build a source of accurate knowledge.² The Henry Ford College paper, The Mirror News, adds that ACCESS was established in 1971 and first focused on immigration and housing services before expanding into cultural work.⁷

Figure

The museum's first three floors

1. 01
   First floorContributions of Arab civilization to medicine, science, mathematics and architecture.
2. 02
   Second floorThe Arab experience in America.
3. 03
   Third floorHow Arab Americans have been portrayed in popular media, and concerns over immigration.

Opening in May 2005

The museum opened in May 2005. NPR’s report from the gala described several hundred guests gathered in the tiled foyer, with galleries holding dozens of interactive exhibits and artifacts: citizenship papers from the turn of the twentieth century, military uniforms, even old X rays.¹ Every artifact was donated. The broadcaster Casey Kasem gave his commemorative plaque from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the actor F. Murray Abraham a Golden Globe statuette, and one corner held the original model of the memorial garden for the poet Kahlil Gibran in Washington.¹ The founding director, Anan Ameri, told NPR that Arab Americans had been forgotten or portrayed negatively and written out of the history of the United States, and that the museum meant to put them back.¹ Upstairs hung portraits of Jack Shaheen, author of books on stereotypes of Arabs in popular culture, and the NASA scientist Farouk El Baz. Shaheen told NPR that earlier generations had been so intent on becoming American that speaking Arabic felt like a disadvantage.¹

The core exhibits

The permanent galleries tell a single story in three parts. The Mirror News names the core exhibits as Coming to America, Living in America and Making an Impact, and quotes the curator of collections saying the museum keeps collecting stories about newcomers and hopes to update the exhibits as migration continues.⁷ History Hit describes the original layout floor by floor, from the contributions of Arab civilization on the first to the portrayal of Arab Americans in popular media on the third.⁶ Making an Impact keeps growing; in 2016 it added ten young Arab Americans, among them the comedian Maysoon Zayid, the industrial designer Karim Rashid and the engineer Rana El Kaliouby.² The early story those galleries open with is told in Lebanese immigration to the United States.

The library and the collections

Behind the galleries sits the research side. The Free Press gallery shows the Russell J. Ebeid Library and Resource Center, a repository for documents and family histories and a base for researchers, along with displays on the writer William Peter Blatty and a typewriter that belonged to the journalist Helen Thomas.⁴ History Hit credits the museum with one of the most extensive archives of Arab American historical documents, oral histories and artifacts, and calls it the only museum in the country that seeks to collect Arab American art, with works by artists such as Emily Jacir and Kamal Boullata.⁶ The anniversary photographs also show a display on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three monotheistic faiths that arose in what is now the Arab world, a bust of the historian Ibn Khaldun, and the exhibition Detroit to Baghdad: Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.⁴

Figure

How selective the Smithsonian affiliation is

• Museums in the United States18,000
• Smithsonian affiliates210

National recognition

The institution won attention beyond Michigan quickly. The Detroit News reported that it gained accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums in record time and was chosen as a Smithsonian affiliate, an honor shared by only 210 of the more than 18,000 museums in the United States.² Two of its own shows, Patriots and Peacemakers on Arab Americans in military service and Little Syria on the old Lower Manhattan community, went on national tour, the second to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.² Its director, Devon Akmon, told Michigan Public that the work is about placing the Arab American story in context with the larger American narrative and countering xenophobia with an accurate depiction.⁵

Exhibitions, music and gatherings

Temporary programming ranges widely. In 2017 the Detroit Metro Times previewed American Landscape, a show by the Syrian born artist Nabil Mousa about identity and belonging in America, paired with a storytelling workshop on sexuality and gender.⁸ In 2025 The Mirror News reviewed the domed ceilings and geometric panels of Harout Bastajian, an Armenian Christian artist from Lebanon who has decorated nearly 50 mosque domes, alongside assemblages by the Palestinian American designer Rajie Cook; at the center of the building hangs al Falaq, a curving metal installation by Alia Ali, the first sculpture ever hung in that space.⁷ History Hit lists a temporary exhibition marking the centenary of the Pen League, the circle of Arab American poets and writers.⁶ Music is part of the mission too. WDET reported in 2023 on JAM3A, a two day festival the museum organized with performers from Sudan, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, its name taken from the Arabic word for gathering.⁹ The museum also runs an artist residency, which The Mirror News reported in 2025 had run for nine years, that pairs visual and performing artists with workshops in Dearborn.⁷ Its Concert of Colors drew 50,000 people in 2015, and its culinary walking tours, a natural companion to Lebanese cuisine, are regularly fully booked.²

Figure

The tenth anniversary year in figures

visitors to the museum in 2015

52,189

visitors to its exhibitions outside Michigan

75,000

operating budget, mostly earned income, grants and donations

$1.9 million

Closure and reopening

It closed when the pandemic reached Michigan in March 2020. The Detroit News reported that it stayed closed for nearly two years, used the time to put new flooring and paint in high traffic areas, updated its boardroom and catering kitchen, and replaced the 2005 film in Living in America with four short films by Arab American artists.³ While shut, it put on roughly 20,000 hours of online events, from book clubs to English and Arabic story times, and it reopened in early 2022 with a solo exhibition by the Yemeni American artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz.³

What the museum cannot do

The museum’s own people have been candid about its limits. Ismael Ahmed, who helped found ACCESS, told The Detroit News that the museum cannot by itself win the battle for fairness and an end to stereotyping.² It works on a small budget, $1.9 million in 2015 and about $1.8 million in 2022, which made a new endowment payment of $100,000 a year for general operations significant.³ It cannot speak for a single community either: it represents people from 22 Arab states, some of them at odds with one another.² What it can do, its founding director said, is reach people outside the community, and by 2015 half of its visitors came from beyond it; for Ameri, success arrives when a visitor from outside walks in and recognizes a story like their own.² At the opening the researcher Louise Cainkar described its walls, doors and roof as an expression of permanence, and permanence is the one thing a building offers that an exhibit alone cannot.¹