Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell brings together significant artworks by three quintessential Abstract artists. The exhibition showcases the museum’s holdings of these artists alongside loans from the Masterworks Foundation, an initiative to share one of the largest private collections in contemporary art with public audiences. It will spotlight Cranbrook Art Museum’s recently restored Preface for Chris (1973) by Joan Mitchell, Found Touch (1973) by Sam Gilliam, and the premiere of a recent gift, The Hunt (2019) by Cecily Brown. Monumental Color highlights each painter’s formal innovations in expressive coloration and gestural mark-making to forge an immersive visual experience.

A leading young Abstract Expressionist painter, Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was active in the New York School of painters and poets and was celebrated for her adeptness with color, often evoking the natural world. One of the great innovators of postwar American painting, Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) expanded his radiant color-drenched surfaces beyond the canvas with his acclaimed drape paintings. Several years prior, Gilliam began to work with acrylic paint on canvas, stretched onto special beveled-edge frames, as seen in Found Touch. Finally, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) is recognized for her lively brushwork and narrative compositions that synthesize art historical tropes and self-referential strategies of European and American painting. Exhibiting selected works by each artist in Cranbrook Art Museum’s Larson Gallery, Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell celebrates each artist’s unique formal innovations, while placing these seminal painters in conversations across time and space unified through color.

Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell is curated by Laura Mott, Chief Curator, and Katy Kim, Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is generously supported by the Masterworks Foundation, the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, the Clannad Foundation, and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum.

Born and raised in metro Detroit, Anna Sui reinvented fashion and pop culture with her signature rock-and-roll romantic label in the 1990s and has remained an artistic fashion icon ever since. The World of Anna Sui at Cranbrook Art Museum represents the international American fashion designer’s return to the city, a cultural hub of rock and roll, techno, and bold artistic experimentation.   

Featuring over 100 looks from the designer’s archive, The World of Anna Sui celebrates the 12 fashion archetypes that reappear throughout Anna Sui’s storied career: Americana, Androgyny, Fairytale, Grunge, Mod, Hippie/Rockstar, Nomad, Punk, Retro, Schoolgirl, Surfer, and Victorian.   

Beginning with her premiere catwalk show in 1991, Sui has shaped not only the garments, textiles, accessories, cosmetics, and interiors that comprise her universe, but also fashion history by popularizing the boutique fashion look. Through head-to-toe looks, Sui has created a graphic universe inhabited by alter-egos from the worlds of cowgirls, grunge girls, hippie chicks, hula girls, Mods, pirate rock stars, Pre-Raphaelite maidens, and surfer nomads. Her fearless approach to creating narratives through her work is legendary: a self-taught historian of culture, art, and fashion, she samples music, books, exhibitions, movies, time periods, photography, and art movements in her designs. Referencing wide-ranging inspirations—vintage Claire McCardell sportswear, army surplus jackets, Japanese hankies—The World of Anna Sui offers a deep inside look into Sui’s imaginative process and visionary stylish world.

The World of Anna Sui was curated by Dennis Nothdruft for the Fashion and Textile Museum, London. It was adapted for Cranbrook Art Museum by Laura Mott, Chief Curator, and Katy Kim, Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, the Clannad Foundation, and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum.

Based in Metro Detroit, Akea Brionne (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary research-driven artist working at the intersection of lens and fiber-based media. Her practice explores the relationship between colonial and imperialist histories and their reverberations into cultural storytelling, identity politics, and assimilation. Through observations focusing on the African Diaspora with a particular interest in Afro Creole culture, Brionne utilizes emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital weaving to translate surreal compositions into multidimensional tapestries adorned with glitter, oil pastels, and rhinestones.   

Situated in the North Gallery, Brionne will display a new body of large multipaneled works depicting Afrosurreal worlds, built from personal and archival reference points, posing themes of awareness, perception, and spiritual and embodied knowledge. Centered on a mythical forest as a site of refuge, Brionne invites visitors to rest and commune. Foregrounding Brionne’s background in photography, these compositions also repeat and reframe the compositional modes of the panorama, portrait, and landscape to new ends.  

Brionne is a 2023 graduate of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the fourth installment of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint series, which highlights recent work from Detroit-area contemporary artists.

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Katy Kim, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow, with support from Laura Mott, Chief Curator. This exhibition is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Deroy Testamentary Foundation, and David Klein Gallery.

Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection presents work by alumni and faculty of Cranbrook Academy of Art, drawn from Cranbrook Art Museum’s permanent collection of over 8,000 objects. Largely focused on work produced since the 1960s, Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection places into dialogue various aesthetic, material, and conceptual connections across time by Academy artists.  

Opening in 1932, Cranbrook Academy of Art evolved from a series of artisanal craft workshops to become one of the most experimental art schools in the United States. Unlike the Bauhaus (1919–1933), the “art school of modernism,” or Black Mountain College (1933–1957), the art school of the postwar avant-garde, Cranbrook lacked a singular artistic manifesto. Instead, three spatial metaphors would come to define the Academy: the creative community of the artist colony; the atelier or workshop model; and the design laboratory. Combined with an absence of required classes, coursework, and grades, the confluence of these factors forged a radical pedagogy of learning through doing.   

Highlighting recent acquisitions to the permanent collection, the design for this exhibition adopts the essential interlocking motif of Eliel Saarinen, the founding president of the Academy and the master architect of its historic campus, as a metaphor for one’s education at the Academy: a labyrinth of one’s own making and a laboratory perpetually fueled by experimentation.    

Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Contemporary Cranbrook Collection is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Kat Goffnett, Associate Curator of Collections, and Katy Kim, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is supported, in part, by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, the Clannad Foundation, David Klein Gallery, and ArtMembers at Cranbrook.

The innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2026 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art. The Degree Exhibition showcases pieces that are the culmination of two years of studio work from a diverse group of graduates as they launch their careers.

An ArtMembers Opening Preview Party will be held on Saturday, April 11, 2026, from 6 to 9pm. Registration will be available closer to the event.

Pop art emerged in Britain and the United States in the late 1950s, becoming a worldwide phenomenon through the 1960s and 1970s. Taking popular culture as a source of inspiration, Pop art often employs bold colors; commercial design, and printing techniques; everyday, sometimes banal, subject matter, or conversely, images from celebrity life and mass media. Pop art had mass appeal, influencing not only artists and designers but also the mass culture itself.  

Pop Art Pop-Up features works drawn from Cranbrook Art Museum’s permanent collection, showcasing the work of iconic Pop artists such as Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and more. The exhibition also underscores the enduring influence of Pop in the work of later artists and designers like Ed Rossbach, Terence Main, and Keith Haring, and in the work of contemporary artists such as KAWS. 

Works on view in Pop Art Pop-Up pair with this season’s Wainger Workshops, artist-led sessions exploring collage, printmaking, and instant photography on select winter Thursdays. 

Pop Art Pop-Up is curated by Cranbrook Art Museum Director Andrew Satake Blauvelt with the assistance of Kat Goffnett, Associate Curator of Collections, and Katy Kim, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow. Pop Art Pop-Up is indebted to the significant gifts from Dr. John and Rose Shuey, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Estate of George Francoeur and Gerald Earls, and Kari and Nicholas Coburn, among others.

Cranbrook Art Museum is generously supported by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the MASCO Foundation, the DeRoy Testamentary Foundation, the Governors of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cranbrook Art Museum, members of the Museum Committee, and ArtMembers at Cranbrook.

In 1974, Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Niagara joined forces to form Destroy All Monsters (DAM), an anti-rock band and artist collective. Named after a Japanese monster movie, the group was formed as an outlet for the young creatives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to explore their rebellious interests in pop culture, film, art, and music at a time when, according to Loren, “a sense of gloom, disaster, and apocalypse, mixed with doses of anarchy, comedy, and absurdity kept us together.” 

Over the past half-century, Destroy All Monsters has lived through an array of evolutions spurred on by line-up changes, creative differences, and changes of focus as the core four members have oscillated between this project and solo practices. DAM projects have included noise and rock music, Xerox art, avant-garde films, cutting-edge zines, and exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan.  

Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters traces the group’s lineage from the early 1970s through today, featuring key moments in the collective’s creative arc. This exhibition explores the group’s source inspirations, including formative moments at God’s Oasis, their early practice space, and the title of their first Xerox fliers. In addition, Mythic Chaos will feature iconic posters, zines, photographs, collages, films, drawings, and banners selected from the DAM archive from 1974 onward. A new iteration of the collective’s “blob” sculpture, The Crème Filled Palace, will be created at Cranbrook. Mythic Chaos aims to not only illustrate the trajectory of Destroy All Monsters but to look at its underpinnings and unveil the often fringe cultural mythos that brought the group together in the post-hippie, pre-punk era.