Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection

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.