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 that contains new insights by more than 25 historians.

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 has rightfully earned. This landmark exhibition represents the first public debut of works from this collection, which has been amassed through generous gifts, museum purchases, and commissions.  

How We Make the Planet Move is the inaugural exhibition in Cranbrook’s Detroit Collection series as the museum continues to grow to include more artists working in and around the city. 

The Detroit Collection is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Kat Goffnett, Associate Curator of Collections, with Laura Mott, Chief Curator, and Andrew Satake Blauvelt, Director. The exhibition is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, Media Genesis, Marc Schwartz and Emily Camiener, and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum.

Toshiko Takaezu is one of the most accomplished artists to work with clay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, acclaimed for her vessels that she treated like canvases for expressive abstraction. Born in Hawai‘i to Okinawan immigrant parents, Takaezu came to study and eventually teach in the summer program at Cranbrook Academy of Art between 1951-1956. This major exhibition centered on her life and work is the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in twenty years.

Worlds Within is a chronological retrospective that charts the development of Takaezu’s hybrid practice over seven decades, documenting her early student work in Hawai‘i and at Cranbrook through her years teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at Princeton University. To represent this evolution, the show will present a series of installations loosely inspired by ones that Takaezu created in her own lifetime: from a set table of functional wares from the early 1950s to an immersive constellation of monumental ceramic forms from the late 1990s to early 2000s. The exhibition will include a vast collection of ceramic sculptures including her signature “closed forms,” Moons, Garden Seats, Trees, and select monumental works from her late masterpiece, the Star Series. It will also feature a broad selection of her vibrant and gestural acrylic paintings and weavings, many of which have rarely been seen. Sound will also play an important role in this exhibition as many of Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms contain unseen “rattles”.

To coincide with the exhibition, a new monograph was published in association with Yale University Press, for which Cranbrook Art Museum contributed new scholarship. This timely exhibition and publication arrive just as Takaezu’s work is receiving renewed critical attention as one of the great modern abstractionists.

Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within is organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, with assistance from the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation and the Takaezu family, and curated by Glenn Adamson, Kate Wiener, and Leilehua Lanzilotti. The exhibition was conceived and developed with former Noguchi Museum Senior Curator Dakin Hart.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the leadership support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation.

The Cranbrook Art Museum presentation is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, and Karen and Drew Bacon.

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. As a result of plucking, her work has been compared to fiber art, highlighting 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 of Agnes Martin. While writers have previously categorized her work as Minimalist, Vedpathak personally describes herself as a “Subtleist”. Martin likewise rejected the categorization under the umbrella of Minimalism, considering herself an Abstract Expressionist. The title of the exhibition—Subtleism—pushes back on the categorization of previous art historiography while allowing a contemporary artist to analyze Martin’s work through a different lens.

Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Laura Mott, Chief Curator, and Andrew Ruys de Perez, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum

A Modernist Regime: The Contemporary Cuban Lens

As part of A Modernist Regime: The Contemporary Cuban Lens, the solo exhibition Marco Castillo: The Hands of the Collector features several bodies of work by the artist and prolific collector of Cuban mid-century design that he initially started to amass while working as part of the artist collective Los Carpinteros (1992–2018). Castillo incorporates the aesthetics derived from Cuban modernism in his practice to resurrect Cuban design history and to critique the oppression by the government against artists, designers, and intellectuals in Cuba. Many of the artworks are named after modernist Cuban architects and designers in homage to this forgotten generation of creators, including Gonzalo Córdoba, María Victoria Caignet, Iván Espín, Reinaldo Togores, Heriberto Duverger, Clara Porset, and Félix Beltrán—all of whom are featured in the companion historical exhibition, also on view at the museum, A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design. Castillo’s work often references the aerial view of the kind of plans that interior designers use to layout a room, but here the objects are in turbulence. The work is a freeze-frame of deconstruction, a reference to the demise of autonomy of Cuban artists and the loss of creative life under a dictatorship.

Media Inquiries:
Julie Fracker
Director of Communications
Office: 248.645.3329
jfracker@cranbrook.edu

As part of A Modernist Regime: The Contemporary Cuban Lens, the exhibition Cuba Dispersa (Cuba Dispersed) features six artists and designers—Julío Llopíz Casal, Liliam Dooley, Anet Melo Glaria, Celia González Álvarez, Hamlet Lavastida, and Ernesto Oroza—that respond to the current conditions in Cuba. As of now, none of the artists live in Cuba, with some forced into exile. Over the past few years, the Cuban government has launched a campaign to suppress the artistic community and control creative production through official legislation, such as Decree 349, in an attempt to quell the outpouring of anti-government artwork and music. The exhibition features six new commissions that use their individual practices to mine these design and material histories to elucidate the past and imagine potential futures. As co-curator Abel González Fernández explains, “When looking at Cuba, we must recognize our fascinating, tragic, elegant, and complex Cuban history. What are we going to keep? We may not have a land for all Cubans to be reunited now because of the dictatorship, but we have a shared memory that unites us.”   

Cuba Dispersa (Cuba Dispersed) and Marco Castillo: The Hands of the Collector are complementary presentations that serve as a contemporary response to the historical survey, A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design, also on view at the museum.

Media Inquiries:
Julie Fracker
Director of Communications
Office: 248.645.3329
jfracker@cranbrook.edu

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This exhibition is the first museum presentation on Cuban mid-century design anchored by an under-acknowledged collection of furniture and furnishings, examples of which have not been exhibited off the island.  

Focused on the decades immediately following the Cuban Revolution (1959), A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Modern Design presents a small but prolific cohort of artists, designers, and architects who responded to the demands of a newly centralized economy, including the material constraints imposed by ensuing embargoes, popular demands for more equitable access to goods, and initial excitement about the role modern design could play in shaping a new society.  

The exhibition includes the pioneering work of designers such as Clara Porset and the furniture produced through the Dujo brand and its successor line EMPROVA, led by Gonzalo Córdoba and María Victoria Caignet. In the 1960s, Dujo continued the trajectory of pre-revolutionary mid-century design to produce unique pieces that featured indigenous cultural references and materials, such as local woods and fibers, and utilized the country’s skilled carpentry workshops. By the mid-1970s, the EMPROVA line of furniture and furnishings utilized modular designs to help fulfill growing domestic demand.  

The exhibition also features designs and prototypes created by the Light Industry Group led by designers Reinaldo Togores, María Teresa Muníz Riva, Eva Bjõrkland, and Heriberto Duverger, who along with others explored contemporary furniture intended for mass production with an emphasis on modularity, utilizing new techniques and technologies, such as particleboard and flat pack assembly, embracing a design-for-all ethos.  

Rounding out the exhibition are a presentation of remarkable posters created for OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America), as well as examples of modern architecture that emerged after the Revolution—which helped establish Cuba’s presence on the international stage. 

Whether through architecture, graphic design, or furniture, A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design is a fascinating story of how modernism was transformed through its contact with capitalist, socialist, and communist economies by negotiating the local and the global; untangling fact from propaganda; and understanding the forces of innovation and limitation on design.  

A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design is complemented by A Modernist Regime: The Contemporary Cuban Lens, which features two presentations: Marco Castillo: The Hands of the Collector and Cuba Dispersa, in which contemporary artists respond to both this earlier design history and the loss of creative freedoms in Cuba today. These exhibitions tell a cautionary tale of how Cuban modernism in design parallels the country’s existential authoritarian conflicts that resulted in a dictatorship that persists today. This trajectory of government control over the production of art, architecture, and design reaches its apex in Cuba today, where artists and other creatives are routinely censored, imprisoned, and exiled. 

The innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2024 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.

The show opens to the public on Sunday, April 7, with a special ArtMembers’ Preview Day on Saturday, April 6.

Virtual Tour of 2024 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art

Ash Arder is a transdisciplinary, researched-focused artist from Flint, Michigan whose work investigates ecological and industrial systems, especially in consideration of the power dynamics between humans, machines, and the natural world. Her practice illuminates moments of intimacy, tenderness, and connection within industrial spaces. She transforms recognizable objects like hardhats and car parts into sculptural forms that contrast the hard, cold bodies of mechanical tools with the soft, warm bodies of the humans that deploy them.

Arder is a 2018 graduate of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Flesh Tones is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the second installment of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint series, which highlights new work from Detroit-area artists. Through deeply personal family narratives, Arder’s practice explores the impact and legacy of the automotive industry in southeastern Michigan. The departure point for Flesh Tones is a photograph of her late parents celebrating her baby shower at the General Motors factory where they were employed. By extracting and highlighting different objects, textures, and details from the assembly line, Arder contrasts the cold, hard forms of machines with the warm, soft bodies of the humans who operate them. The intertwining of personal and industrial histories continues with Arder’s manipulation of a 1987 Cadillac Sedan de Ville – her family car from childhood – that she sourced from a junkyard and deconstructed.

Flesh Tones encompasses a celebration of community brought together through industry while also exposing the complicated nature of aligning identity and well-being with material possessions. Arder’s work memorializes the often obsolete, ephemeral residue of a system at a crossroads in a time of climate change. Rather than a melancholy goodbye to the proverbial, resource-intensive machine, she offers an optimistic rebirth through a demonstration of solar power. Arder harnesses the source of renewable energy to ask who is keeping whom—or what—alive in a time defined by inextricable human-machine relationships.

Virtual Tour of Ash Arder: Flesh Tones

Ash Arder: Flesh Tones is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Andrew Ruys de Perez, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow, with support by Laura Mott, Chief Curator. This exhibition is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation and the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund.

Carl Toth: Reordering Fictions examines various bodies of work that the artist created over his more than forty-year career, from early black and white photography to his pioneering work in alternative photographic techniques. Through his interest in torquing reality, Toth sought to expand the field of photography through his exploration of the SX-70 Polaroid camera and his adoption of the photocopier as his camera lens of choice. Toth’s intricate use of collage and photomontage resulted in masterful compositions of complex still-life tableaux, toeing the line between representation and abstraction.  

Carl Toth (1947–2022) served as Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1972 until 2007, shaping generations of students. Toth brought a personal interest in literature and literary theory to the Academy at a time when such ideas were just beginning to redirect the medium. The title, Reordering Fictions, is derived from a quote by the artist—a nod to the Toth’s affinity for the written word and the constructed nature of the realities that accompany photographic representation. 

Carl Toth: Reordering Fictions is the first museum exhibition to reassess Toth’s legacy in photography.

Virtual Tour of Carl Toth: Reordering Fictions

Carl Toth: Reordering Fictions is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Kat Goffnett, Assistant Curator of Collections. The exhibition is supported, in part, by the George Francoeur Art Museum Exhibition Fund, ArtPack Services, Inc., and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum.