Punk rock meets visual art at a pair of shows at Cranbrook | METRO TIMES

By Lee DeVito As Cranbrook Art Museum director Andrew Blauvelt points out, the Latin root of the word “amatuer” is “love” — and that’s the spirit behind two upcoming shows at the museum, which delve into the visual world of punk rock ethos. “If you’re a graphic designer or nerd like I am, you’ll understand […]

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

Punk art shouts from the walls of Cranbrook in new show | OAKLAND PRESS

By Joseph Szczesny, For Digital First Media Punk music has made loud waves ever since the 1970s. But the punk sensibility also caught on with visual artists, who used a variety of media to stretch the philosophy of punk beyond music into different corners of popular culture, says Andrew Blauvelt, the director of the Cranbrook […]

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

How punk rock changed the course of design history | CO. DESIGN

BY KELSEY CAMPBELL-DOLLAGHAN Punk, and its associated subcultures, revolutionized design practice. A slew of new shows and books reckons with its impact. Do you remember the first zine someone put in your hands? If you lived through punk’s heydey, or any of the subcultures that reverberated down from its birth to echo into the mid-aughts, […]

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 opens at Cranbrook Art Museum | DEZEEN

Photo by PD Rearick “If punk birthed a thousand garage bands, it certainly birthed as many designers,” says Punk Graphics curator By Gunseli Yalcinkaya The curator of a new exhibition on punk graphics at Detroit’s Cranbrook Art Museum, has selected five key works that explore the movement in the United States and United Kingdom. The […]

Tagged: design, exhibition design, Music

Tony Hawk Partners on New Skate Park to Open in Downtown Detroit | Detroit Free Press

Tony Hawk is bringing a skate park to downtown Detroit. The skateboarding legend is overseeing the design of the modular pocket park that initially will sit at the corner of Farmer and Monroe, one block northeast of Campus Martius. It’s scheduled to open Aug. 16. The Wayfinding skate park will not only be the first […]

Cranbrook grad art show opens Sunday, April 23 | The Oakland Press

One uses a wedding dress to explore like a thread to bind the use of different media, another bends wood into an irresistible structure and another uses intricate patterns to explore both personal and political history.

The new artworks are part of one of Oakland County’s top cultural events every year, the annual Graduate Degree Exhibition of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which opens to the public Sunday, April 23, and will be on display through May 14.

Cranbrook graduates have big ideas for annual student show  | Detroit Metro Times

Fundamentally, metro Detroit's two most prominent art schools — the College for Creative Studies and the Cranbrook Academy of Art — couldn't be more different. While both are located off of Woodward Avenue, they're worlds apart: CCS in the city's core, and Cranbook in leafy, suburban Bloomfield Hills.

Of course, an environment inevitably informs an artist's work, and it's easy to see this with Cranbrook's annual graduate student exhibition. While CCS's student work may have more of an emphasis on technical virtuosity, Cranbrook's student art tends to be — much like its wooded campus — sprawling, often featuring elaborate, large-scale installation work.

This year's show features the work of the 64 graduates from Cranbrook's two-year Master's program. The school has 10 departments,with fewer than a dozen students in each. Cranbrook's is the only completely studio-based program in the country — there are no classes. Students live and work on campus, working directly with their respective department's artist-in-residence.

Cranbrook Art Museum Exhibits Period Rooms | The Detroit News

“Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth Century Period Rooms” is a small but utterly charming show of four interiors that all channel the zeitgeist of their respective eras. Drawn from Cranbrook’s vast reserves of furniture and artifacts, these little stage sets variously represent the early Arts and Crafts aesthetic that emerged in England during the late Victorian […]

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Ingrid LaFleur, Laura Mott, Urban Jupena

Honest To Goodness: One Thousand “Truths” from Detroit & Flint on Display at Cranbrook Art Museum | WDET CultureShift

The Truth Booth is a traveling, story-snagging sculpture created by artist Hank Willis Thomas and the Cause Collective. It was designed to capture unfiltered opinions of folks throughout the world, including Ireland and Afghanistan. The exterior of the aforementioned booth is shaped like a giant cartoon speech bubble with the word ‘TRUTH’ boldly printed on one side. The interior acts much like a photo booth, the kind you might encounter at a wedding, but it serves as a studio to record video responses from the public. Confessions, almost. Each video starts with the participant saying “The truth is …” and expounding from there.

The Truth Is… | Culture Source

Maybe you saw it, an inflatable cartoon speech bubble with the word “TRUTH” emblazoned on it that popped up in neighborhoods throughout Michigan this past summer?

What did it mean?

As no two “truths” are the same, The Truth Booth meant different things to different people.

“Some people saw it as a soapbox, some people saw it as a confessional, some people saw it as a way to engage,” recalls Laura Mott, curator of contemporary art at Cranbrook Art Museum of visitors interacting with the Booth at 11 stops throughout Metro Detroit and Flint.

“We never told people what to say, we just said: ‘We invite you into the booth.’”

Tagged: Detroit, MI, Laura Mott, MI, The Cause Collective