Masterworks: Monumental Color

Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell brings together significant artworks by three quintessential Abstract artists. The exhibition showcases the museum’s holdings of these artists alongside loans from the Masterworks Program, an initiative to share one of the largest private collections in contemporary art with public audiences. It will spotlight Cranbrook Art Museum’s recently restored Preface for Chris (1973) by Joan Mitchell, Found Touch (1973) by Sam Gilliam, and the premiere of a recent gift, The Hunt (2019) by Cecily Brown. Monumental Color highlights each painter’s formal innovations in expressive coloration and gestural mark-making to forge an immersive visual experience.  

A leading young Abstract Expressionist painter, Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was active in the New York School of painters and poets and was celebrated for her adeptness with color, often evoking the natural world. One of the great innovators of postwar American painting, Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) expanded his radiant color-drenched surfaces beyond the canvas with his acclaimed drape paintings. Several years prior, Gilliam began to work with acrylic paint on canvas, stretched onto special beveled-edge frames, as seen in Found Touch. Finally, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) is recognized for her lively brushwork and narrative compositions that synthetize art historical tropes and self-referential strategies of European and American painting. Exhibiting selected works by each artist in Cranbrook Art Museum’s Larson Gallery, Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell celebrates each artist’s unique formal innovations, while placing these seminal painters in conversations across time and space unified through color.