Pop Art Pop-Up

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 ...

Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters

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 ...

Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley

Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley is the first mid-career survey devoted to artists and twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas (b. 1984, Austin, Texas), who founded their collaborative studio in Los Angeles in 2010.  The duo is known for their artistic practice that cross-pollinates the fields of art, craft, design, and technology.  The brothers’ materially rich work reveals a frenzied creative imagination combined with a right-brain inventiveness—a process they refer to as “problem-solving fantasies.” Much of their art is a continuation of fictive characters, fantastic creatures, and other-worldly realms often filtered through cultural references and technological aesthetics of growing up in the 1990s and early aughts. Often irreverent and always meticulous, their artworks explore themes related to nature, fantasy, the subconscious, and the human experience. Conceptually, they embrace the surrealistic, the animistic, and the zoomorphic, for instance, to conjure alternative realms.  The exhibition includes examples from the major bodies of work that the ...

Tagged: Laura Mott

2025 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art

The innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2025 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.Purchase the 2025 Graduate Degree Exhibition Book in person and online while supplies last. Designed by Mike Michalski (CAA 2D Design 2025) and Daniel Lee (CAA 2D Design 2025).ArtMembers save 15% with code "ArtMem".Not an ArtMember? Join today!Virtual Tour of The 2025 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art

Tagged: 2025

Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US

This large-scale survey of one of the most important and persistent movements of modern design in the United States in the twentieth century shines a light on Cranbrook’s pivotal role in its development and the contributions of additional women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and designers of color during this period. Based on the famous quote by Cranbrook alumnus and teacher Charles Eames, “Eventually everything connects: people, ideas, objects,” the exhibition contains some 200 works by nearly 100 artists, architects, and designers that explore the multitude of relationships between these three fundamental pillars. The exhibition features many new additions to Cranbrook’s collection of important furniture, textiles, and furnishings from the period.This expansive exhibition is accompanied by an equally expansive 400-plus-page book published with Phaidon and available from our shop (pre-order, shipping in July) that contains new insights by more than 25 historians.Virtual Tour of Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the U.S.Eventually ...

Tagged: 2025, Andrew Satake Blauvelt, Bridget Bartal

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I

In 2016, Cranbrook Art Museum inaugurated a new permanent collection devoted to celebrating and preserving the work of artists and designers in the metro Detroit area—its first new collection in decades. At the same time, the Art Museum dedicated funds to acquire more works by women, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ identified individuals in a project to diversify its permanent collection. Designed to acknowledge the long-standing history of artists who have called Detroit home and the area’s rich and diverse community of practitioners, the Detroit Collection is particularly focused on art from the 1960s to the present in a variety of media. How We Make the Planet Move takes its title from a poem by Detroit-born poet, jessica Care moore, A Poem Saved My Life: An Homage to Detroit. Cranbrook Art Museum’s Detroit Collection itself aims to hold the art of Detroit up, giving it the attention and reverie it ...

Tagged: Cranbrook Art Museum

Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin

Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin will showcase a new body of work by Detroit-based abstractionist Neha Vedpathak alongside important canonical works by Agnes Martin, the great American painter associated with Minimalism and a principal influence on Vedpathak’s practice.Born in India, Vedpathak has spent the past decade in Detroit developing a unique technique of manipulating paper that she calls “plucking.” The time-consuming, labor-intensive process consists of creating countless incisions in painted, hand-made Japanese mulberry paper, known for its long, strong fibers. Her work highlights questions of materiality, texture, and mark-making. Vedpathak views the act of plucking to be resonant with meditation as the creation of work involves a repetitive, ritualistic, and durational act for long periods of time—sometimes multiple weeks for larger pieces. In her work, Vedpathak asks the question, “When does the mundane become magical?”Vedpathak perceives many parallels, alongside the meditative aspect of creation, between her practice and that ...