Join us for a series of talks with artists, gallerists and Detroiters in conjunction with the exhibition How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I (October 26, 2024 – March 2, 2025), the debut of Cranbrook Art Museum’s new permanent collection devoted to celebrating and preserving the work of artists and designers in the metro Detroit area—its first new collection in decades.
At the same time, the Art Museum dedicated funds to acquire more works by women, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ identified individuals in a project to diversify its permanent collection. Designed to acknowledge the long-standing history of artists who have called Detroit home and the area’s rich and diverse community of practitioners, the Detroit Collection is particularly focused on art from the 1960s to the present in a variety of media.
In Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality, Laura Mott highlights Detroit as an active force, with its artists constantly “rethinking, repurposing, and reimagining.” Many artists featured in How We Make the Planet Move embody this ethos, using their practices to engage with Detroit, community, and identity. Resourcefulness: Material Identity will explore how two artists from different generations explore identity – both culturally and individually – through a variety of methodologies and mediums.
Detroit native Lester Johnson has spent decades building up his material vocabulary, working with everything from found objects, to fine textiles, to painting. Allana Clarke, a newer transplant to the city, works in materials that have connection to the body including shea butter and hair-bonding glue. Though these artists’ materialities differ, they share a desire to comment on lived, embodied experience. Using abstraction as a primary mode of expression, both Clarke and Johnson demonstrate an ongoing dedication to reimagining what materials can be, how they function, and what they communicate about our identity.
Free and open to all!
Tagged: Artist Talk, talks
Watch Previous Lectures
