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 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, and ArtMembers of Cranbrook Art Museum.