2016

From the Vault: Recent Gifts to the Collection

From the Vault is a series of exhibitions drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works of modern and contemporary art, architecture, craft, and design. For this installment of the series, we have chosen to focus on a small but significant sampling of recent and promised gifts to the Museum that help highlight key aspects of our unique and diverse collection. On display are key works from distinguished graduates of Cranbrook Academy of Art, one of the nation’s leading graduate programs, which constitutes a major focus of our collection. You will also find other outstanding examples of modern and contemporary art by key figures of the twentieth century that enhance our ability to tell a more comprehensive story. Work by important twentieth-century masters such as Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson, Anni Albers, Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschenberg will be on display alongside work by acclaimed Cranbrook Academy of Art artists and alumna ...

Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms

Exhibitions

Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms draws its inspiration from traditional museum period rooms, reinventing that presentation model by featuring distinct spaces that examine key moments in Cranbrook’s history. As a contemporary interpretation of such spaces, this exhibition features four distinct rooms that examine key moments in the evolution of the twentieth-century domestic landscape: The Naturalist’s Athenaeum Devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement that inspired Cranbrook’s founders, George and Ellen Scripps Booth, in the early 20th century, The Naturalist’s Athenaeum explores the ethos of the movement and the study of the natural world. The athenaeum, a sanctuary reserved for literary and scientific learning, is inhabited by artworks, handicraft objects, rare books and natural specimens that speak to a mindset that champions the intricacies of nature and human skill without the interference of technological production and artificiality. The Bachelor Pad Evoking mid-century modernism in America birthed at Cranbrook Academy of Art, The Bachelor Pad ...

Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey

Exhibitions

Edward Gorey’s masterful pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate his captivating books conjure a vaguely Edwardian world of handcars, boater hats, and Dickensian children. With titles such as The Hapless Child, The Loathsome Couple, and The Fatal Lozenge, Gorey’s protagonists often meet an untimely demise. Despite the subject matter, his work transcends the mere macabre, offering instead a dark humor that has found contemporary resonance with cultural phenomena from Goth and steampunk to Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton. Although Gorey’s métier was the illustrated novel, his talent and reach extended to other creative realms, including his Tony Award-winning and hauntingly beautiful stage sets and costumes for a 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey features many of his famed publications, including several elaborately designed artist’s books and other assorted ephemera and memorabilia.

2016 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art

2016 Graduate Degree Show Exhibitions

The most innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2016 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 more than 80 graduates as they launch their careers.

Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings 790A and 790B: Irregular Alternating Color Bands

Exhibitions Sol Lewitt

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 and architecture.Wall Drawings 790A and 790B, like most of LeWitt’s wall drawings, exist only for the duration of the exhibition before being destroyed, privileging the conception of the work over its physical manifestation and demonstrating the artist’s dictum that “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Still, the physical form of the work retains an undeniable beauty: LeWitt’s sinuous line and fulsome color together serve as an arresting counterpoint to Eliel Saarinen’s airy interior space.

The Cranbrook Salon

The Cranbrook Salon is the second installment of an ongoing series that explores Cranbrook’s collections through the history of exhibition design. This display draws its inspiration from the salon-style hanging technique, which originated in late seventeenth-century Paris at the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In order to accommodate the great quantity of works submitted to the annual student exhibition, the paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling. The exhibition later relocated to the Salon Carré (Square Salon) at the Louvre, and the event—and its mode of display—eventually adapted its name from the venue. This contemporary installation explores the salon as a mind map, constructing thematic connections and groupings from artworks that span wide-ranging stylistic movements and time periods. While the handheld gallery guide provides insight into these groupings, viewers are also invited to explore the exhibition with minds open to discovery, forging their own associations between these works of art. The Cranbrook Salon ...

The Truth Is I Hear You

Exhibitions

This exhibition is the culmination of a two-week project involving The Truth Booth, a portable, inflatable video recording studio in the shape of a giant speech bubble developed by The Cause Collective. The booth toured eleven locations in Metro Detroit and Flint, Michigan, in the summer of 2016. At each location, participants had up to two minutes to record a statement starting with the words, “The Truth Is…”. The recorded results of this project, numbering nearly one thousand, have been used to create an ambitious 60-foot-wide video installation. Accompanying the video will be documentation of the regional Truth Booth tour by photographer Corine Vermeulen (a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art) and video by Detroit-based filmmakers The Right Brothers. The exhibition will also include a participatory room by The Cause Collective allowing museum visitors to write their own responses to the question "The Truth Is..." on helium-filled speech-bubble balloons.The Truth Booth is an opportunity ...

Simple Forms, Stunning Glazes: The Gerald W. McNeely Collection of Pewabic Pottery

Exhibitions Pewabic Pottery

Organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and Cranbrook Art Museum, this exhibition debuts the Gerald W. McNeely Collection, one of the largest private collections of Pewabic Pottery recently donated to Cranbrook Art Museum and never before seen in its entirety. The Collection includes over 117 works including a Revelation Pottery Vase, which pre-dates the founding of Pewabic, and includes works from throughout the career of Mary Chase Perry Stratton, founder of Pewabic Pottery. The exhibition will also highlight Cranbrook’s own collection of Pewabic Pottery from the Art Museum and campus, which George Gough Booth, founder of Cranbrook, actively collected over his lifetime.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

Exhibitions

This Walker Art Center-organized exhibition, assembled with the assistance of the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive, examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Loosely organized around Timothy Leary’s famous mantra, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” the exhibition charts the evolution of the period, from pharmacological, technological, and spiritual means to expand consciousness and alter one’s perception of reality, to the foment of a publishing revolution that sought to create new networks of like-minded people and raise popular awareness to some of the era’s greatest social and political struggles, to new ways of refusing mainstream society in favor of ecological awareness, the democratization of tools and technologies, and a more communal survival. Presenting a broad range of art forms and artifacts of the era, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia features experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive and participatory media environments, ...

Designs of the Times: 100 Years of Posters at Cranbrook

Exhibitions

Designs of the Times is the third exhibition in the Cranbrook Archives ephemera series. The exhibition, which represents Cranbrook’s diverse audiences by exploring both design and history, illustrates the impact of new technologies and the information age on the poster medium as visual communication. Organized chronologically, the exhibition documents the curatorial, educational, musical, scientific, social, and theatrical events that have enhanced and enriched the Cranbrook community for more than a century. The posters provide a forum for study, not only of historical events but also of the way they are represented through the poster as a social and cultural medium, reflecting the evolution of poster design in response to the changing needs of society.