Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings 790A and 790B: Irregular Alternating Color Bands(1995) fill the Hartmann Gallery with serpentine bands of bold color applied directly to the wall. A pioneer of Conceptual Art, LeWitt conceived his wall drawings as a medium through which he could explore the concept of serial permutation while mining the tension between art […]
Cranbrook and the camera grew up together. In the 1920s, as George and Ellen Booth were realizing their dream of a community dedicated to art, science, and education, amateur filmmaking flourished as a newly affordable hobby. These two historical trajectories—that of an educational community and of a medium that has shaped the cultural experience of […]
Throughout a career spanning over half a century, former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and instructor Ken Isaacs (b. 1927) radically deconstructed conventional notions of modernism. His Living Structures—hand-made, low-cost, multifunctional furniture and architectural units—challenged ideas of how people could sit, work, and live within their own homes and the broader built environment. Culture Breakers: […]
Andy Warhol envisioned the record cover as a means to popularize his name as an artist and, once he reached iconic status in the 1960s, used it to directly impact popular culture. Designed to be collected by the masses, the records—numbering more than fifty— reinforce his maxim “repetition adds up to reputation.” While only a […]
This first comprehensive survey of Paul Evans’s work, this exhibition will document Evans’s role in the midcentury American studio furniture movement, his approach to furniture as sculpture and abstract composition, and his unremitting new approaches to metal. Opening earlier this year at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and then traveling to Cranbrook Art […]
Coveted Objects, the first solo exhibition in Michigan by the Detroit-based artist and metalsmith Lauren Kalman, explores issues of taste and desire that inform our sensibilities towards the body and design objects. The exhibition consists of a selection of photographs and props used in staged vignettes featuring painted-gold bodies that contort, shape, and interact with […]
Bend is a solo exhibition by contemporary jewelry artist Iris Eichenberg, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. As a point of departure, Eichenberg revisited her artistic practice, which is renowned for its diverse collections and challenges to the definitions of craft and jewelry; the result is an unconventional retrospective […]
The Cranbrook Hall of Wonders draws its inspiration from the precursor to the modern museum: the “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Wunderkammer,” a sixteenth-century collecting and display technique in which art, ornate functional objects, natural oddities, and anthropological discoveries co-existed together as a microcosm of knowledge. This contemporary interpretation is a floor-to-ceiling installation featuring Cranbrook Art […]
In the spring, summer, and fall of 2015, Cranbrook Art Museum and Detroit served as the backdrop for Nick Cave’s most ambitious project to date – Nick Cave: Here Hear. At the invitation of Cranbrook Art Museum, Cave staged seven months of events throughout the city of Detroit anchored by his first solo exhibition at Cranbrook Art […]
In commemoration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia is the first museum exhibition devoted to Harry Bertoia’s designs for jewelry. The former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and metalsmithing instructor has received international acclaim for his metal furniture and sculpture, but his exploration of the medium originated […]
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