Cranbrook Art Museum to Open “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within”

Exhibition is the first traveling retrospective of the artist’s work in 20 years

On view: October 9, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Special ArtMembers Exclusive Weekend: October 5–6

ArtMembers Preview Party for All Fall Exhibitions: October 25, 2024

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., Sept. 18, 2024 – This fall, Cranbrook Art Museum will present three new exhibitions to its galleries, including Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in 20 years. It will accompany two exhibitions featuring Detroit-based artists, How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I and Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin, opening later in the month. All exhibitions support Cranbrook Art Museum’s mission to continue to feature work from Detroit artists and those with a connection to Cranbrook Academy of Art.

ArtMembers can see the exhibition first at a special “ArtMember Preview Weekend,” October 5-6. The exhibition will open to the general public on Oct. 9. The remaining fall exhibitions will open on Oct. 25. Visit our website for more details.

Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within
October 9, 2024–January 12, 2025

Cranbrook Art Museum is the second stop on the national tour of Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within. Organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the exhibition at Cranbrook will feature approximately 115 objects from public and private collections across the country, including Cranbrook’s own collection.

Toshiko Takaezu was a groundbreaking 20th-century abstract artist most celebrated for her prolific output of expressively glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures that ranged in scale from palm-sized works to immersive sculptural environments.

Of Okinawan heritage and born in Hawai‘i she studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1951 to 1953 and then taught in its summer program through 1956. She was drawn to Cranbrook for the chance to study under Maija Grotell, the Finnish ceramics artist and teacher who served as the Academy’s Ceramics Artist-in-Residence from 1938-1966.

“Hawai‘i was where I learned technique,” Takaezu has said. “Cranbrook was where I found myself.”

In addition to studying with Grotell, Takaezu had the opportunity to study with Marianne Strengell at Cranbrook, the Fiber Artist-in-Residence, providing a rare opportunity to study with two women during a time when academia was dominated by men.

“The exhibition Toshiko Takaezu: World’s Within showcases the imagination and ambition of her prolific career that is noted for its creative, technical achievements in ceramics as well as for her intuitive painting practice and skilled weavings —truly an awe-inspiring world,” said Laura Mott, Chief Curator of Cranbrook Art Museum.

Mott continues, “It also reveals a rich personal history of independence and life-long dedication to being an artist. Imagine what it must have been like for a young woman in the early 1950s coming from a plantation life in Hawai’i to study far away at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. There were few pathways for women to be artists and leaders in education, and once Toshiko discovered it here at Cranbrook, she made it her life story.”

This exhibition aims to trace the evolution of Takaezu’s practice and reframe her as one of the most compelling and conceptually innovative American artists of the last century. It considers the range, depth, and development of Takaezu’s work with a particular focus on the worlds she conjured within individual forms and environmental installations.

The development of Takaezu’s hybrid practice over seven decades will be examined, documenting her early student work in Hawai‘i and at Cranbrook through her years teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at Princeton University. To represent this evolution, the show will present a series of installations inspired by progressions in Takaezu’s own lifetime: from a set table of functional wares from the early 1950s to an immersive constellation of monumental ceramic forms from the late 1990s to early 2000s.

The exhibition will include a vast collection of ceramic sculptures including her signature “closed forms,” Moons, Garden, Seats, and select monumental works from her late masterpiece, the Star Series. It will also feature a broad selection of her vibrant and gestural acrylic paintings and weavings, many of which have rarely been seen,. Sound will also play an important role in this exhibition as many of Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms contain unseen “rattles.”

The exhibition opens to the public on October 9 and will run through January 12, 2025. Cranbrook Art Museum ArtMembers will get a chance to see the exhibition before the public, on Oct. 5–6.

To coincide with the exhibition, a new monograph was published in association with Yale University Press, for which Cranbrook Art Museum contributed new scholarship. The monograph will be available for purchase in the Cranbrook Art Museum store.

After its time at Cranbrook, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2–May 18, 2025), the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026).

Special Events

A special performance and talk featuring the Tana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company will be held Thursday, December 5, and Saturday, December 7, where the group will perform to the sounds of new works by composer Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti (finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music) centered on the hidden element of sound in Takaezu’s works. They will also hear about Burgess’ journey as an Asian-American choreographer and his connection to Takaezu through his parents Anna Kang and Joseph Burgess, both Cranbrook Academy of Art alumni.

On Thursday, January 9, noted curator, writer, and historian Glenn Adamson will visit for a conversation with Chief Curator Laura Mott and current Cranbrook Academy of Art Ceramics Artist-in-Residence, Ian McDonald.

Visit our website for more information about the exhibitions How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I and Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin, both opening on October 26, 2024, and running through March 2, 2025.