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.
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.
Like much of America, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave watched the 1991 video of the LAPD beating Rodney King. King's mortality and fragility scared Cave so much that he immediately went to the studio and began creating a form of protection. The wearable suit of armor made of twigs marked the beginning of Cave's now-renowned series of soundsuits. Prior to the L.A. riots the artist made large-scale paintings, but since then he has become a public performer who grapples with blackness, sexuality, and the idea of one's body. This weekend, Cave embarked on a series of new performances and saw the opening of his 7,000-square foot retrospective, "Here Hear," at the museum of his alma mater, Cranbrook Academy of Art, just outside of Detroit."The soundsuits have taken on a life of their own," Cave says of the project's 25-year duration. The bright whimsical sculptural works have grown alongside the artist's practice and are as much about creative expression as they are Ferguson, or Charleston, South Carolina; they have evolved from a form of protection to represent a type of dreamy confidence that pushes the boundaries of visibility.
Photo Gallery of 82 photos by Christopher M. Bjornberg.
A gallery of 25 photos by Jeannette Fleury.
39221 Woodward Ave Box 801
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48303
248.645.3323
artmuseum@cranbrook.edu
Copyright © 2024 Cranbrook Art Museum. All rights reserved. Created by Media Genesis.
