THIS SUMMER, MAJOR CITIES are presenting major exhibitions featuring the work of important African American artists. In greater Detroit, Nick Cave (shown above) is staging pop-up performances showcasing his mesmerizing Soundsuits in conjunction with a museum exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, his first in Michigan. In New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem is mounting the first solo museum exhibition of veteran painter Stanley Whitney. Baltimore photographer Devin Allen, a novice whose image of police protests landed on the cover of Time magazine, is getting his first-ever exhibition at the city’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.
Nick Cave has taken performance art to another level with his seven-month experiential “Performance Series” in Detroit, and the museum exhibition “Here Hear” at Cranbrook Art Museum, which in addition to presenting his famous Soundsuit sculptures, also serves as a living document of this ambitious project. In effect, Cave, with the cooperation of numerous other parties in Detroit, has turned the city into a living canvas. Here, we talk with Cave about his ambitious project, collective dreaming and the Cranbrook legacy.
George Nelson is considered one of the most influential figures in American design during the second half of the twentieth century. Operating from the western side of Michigan as Design Director at the Zeeland-based furniture manufacturer Herman Miller for more than twenty years, Nelson had his sights firmly focused on Cranbrook, which was also playing […]
For his first solo exhibition in Michigan, Danish ceramist Anders Ruhwald will present a series of “site-sensitive” installations in Saarinen House, the “total work of art” designed by the Finnish American architect Eliel Saarinen in 1930. Saarinen House, which Cranbrook Art Museum operates as a historic house museum, will provide the ideal backdrop for Ruhwald’s […]
CHICAGO — Until he went to art school, Nick Cave considered himself an artist first and a black artist second.Then he showed up at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit in 1986 to get his MFA and discovered he was the only minority student on campus. In an instant, his perspective fundamentally changed.“I literally was in a state of shock,” he says. “It was the first time I ever had to deal with my race and to think of myself as a black male.”As a celebrated alumni, he is returning to Cranbrook this summer and fall to rectify the isolation he felt nearly 30 years ago with hopes to inspire and influence young black artists throughout Detroit. There will be an exhibition of his work — colorful masked and wearable sculptures he calls “soundsuits” — which is serving as the first phase of a six-month series throughout the city that will involve coordination and partnerships with schools, cultural centers, dance companies, businesses and museums for performances and other events that will take place on the street, in classrooms and theaters, and along the riverfront. These are not arbitrary art events but instead will bear the signature of Cave’s work: colorful, musical, involving grand theatrical performances that address diversity through empowerment
Tagged: Nick Cave, Washington Post
Read MoreNow through the fall, Detroit will become the backdrop for artist Nick Cave’s most ambitious project to date, including seven months of events and his first solo exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, all funded by the Knight Arts Challenge. Here Cranbrook Curator Laura Mott writes about the launch of Cave’s exhibit at the museum, including his signature embellished costumes known as Soundsuits, which will be on display through Oct. 11.Nick Cave: Here Hear lived up to its celebratory title last weekend with the exhibition opening at Cranbrook Art Museum, the launch of the publication Nick Cave: Greetings From Detroit, the film screening at the historic Redford Theatre, and performances at The Artist Village. Whew! Thanks to you Detroit, it was downright incredible.
WDIV-T in Detroit aired a segment about the Nick Cave exhibition on June 25th, available online at Click On Detroit.
Blouin ArtInfo shares an online gallery of 11 images from Nick Cave's Brightmoor Community Events at the Redford Theatre and the Artist's Village.
Throughout the summer and fall artist Nick Cave will be dancing in the streets of Detroit in his whimsical 'soundsuits.' For Cave's city-wide takeover for Here Hear, the artist is staging participatory performances including HEARD Detroit, a restaging of his 2013 HEARD•NY Grand Central Terminal performance. In Detroit, Cave will dance not with professionals, as he did in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall, but with 60 high school students. In a 7,000 square foot exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, the museum of his alma mater, Cave is also showing the largest collection of his work of sculptural soundsuits, video, and paintings, to-date.
Nick Cave has taken the Detroit area by storm with "Here Hear," a much-anticipated exhibition of his ornate Soundsuits and other newly-commissioned artworks at the Cranbrook Art Museum in the suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.The exhibition includes a variety of summer happenings like dance labs, performances, educational programs, and a forthcoming book called Greetings From Detroit.While Cave's enigmatic, otherworldly Soundsuits are as vibrant as ever, there's one that holds an especially timely message: TM 13 was created in 2015 in memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager who was fatally shot by former neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman in 2012.
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