Two Knight Arts grantees stepped onto the national stage this week as the New York Times profiled the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC in a piece about art museums exploring new marketing avenues. DIA’s commercial for its “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” commercial and the Mint Museum’s billboards for its “Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections” are both profiled.

Click here to read the entire article and below for an excerpt:

Cross posted from the New York Times:

A NEW commercial for the Detroit Institute of Arts opens with a woman responding to an off-camera interviewer, although the question is not revealed: “He had olive skin.”

“He had pale skin,” says another woman, and then about a dozen others of various ages and ethnicities field mystery questions, with responses including: “Black, wavy, wavy hair.” “Blond hair that’s really silky.” “He looked like a hippie.” “Yeah, he was Jewish.” “He was black like me.”

The commercial, by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Detroit, part of the Omnicom Group, is for “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” opening Sunday, an exhibit that features 64 works by the Dutch master and his students in the 1640s that depict Jesus and biblical events.

Living in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Rembrandt is thought to have used Jewish neighbors as models, resulting in representations of Jesus, who of course was never painted contemporaneously, that are darker skinned than the blond, blue-eyed depictions popular before and since.

In the commercial, after interviewees give contrasting responses, a voiceover says, “No one knows what he really looked like. Come see Jesus, as Rembrandt saw him.”