Within the wanderlust embodied in Alec Soth’s photographs is an impulse to uncover narratives that comprise the American experience. “From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America,” organized by the Minneapolis-based Walker Art Center, will open at Cranbrook Art Museum November 17, 2012, and run through March 30, 2013. It is the first major U.S. survey to explore the past 15 years of work by one of the most compelling voices in contemporary photography. While Soth’s practice has taken him throughout the world, the Cranbrook exhibition focuses specifically on his pictures made in the United States.

Featuring over 100 photographs, the presentation includes early black-and-white images of Minneapolis working-class taverns, as well as examples from his well-known series Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA,Fashion Magazine, The Last Days of W, Soth’s major new series, Broken Manual, as well as other bodies of work not exhibited until now. Soth will also debut a new body of work at Cranbrook that will be the result of a “road trip” the artist will be taking across Michigan in the weeks leading up to the presidential election in November.

Soth’s distinct perspective is one in which the act of wandering, the method of embracing serendipity when seeking out his subjects, and the process of telling are as resonant as the photographic record of his remarkable encounters. When considered together, these pictures probe the idiosyncrasies of people, objects and places he discovers on his journeys, and form an offbeat and absorbing portrait of the American experience.

What happens when emerging architects, artists, and designers get together and throw themselves a party? Find out at the “2013 Graduate Degree Exhibition,” one of the largest and most exciting exhibitions of art and design in the country, opening on April 21 at Cranbrook Art Museum.

The annual Degree Show of Cranbrook Academy of Art is the culmination of two years of studio work at the nation’s top-ranked independent graduate school of architecture, art and design. This is the same show that launched the careers of Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia, Massamichi Udagawa, Anne Wilson, Hani Rashid, Nick Cave, Tony Matelli, Ed Fella, Lorraine Wild, Martin Venezky, Beth Katleman, Sonya Clark, and many more.

The exhibition takes place in almost 15,000 square feet of galleries at Cranbrook’s historic Eliel Saarinen designed Art Museum. The Museum has recently undergone a $22 million renovation and expansion that is creating one of the most significant exhibition and research facilities in the United States.

The Cranbrook Academy of Art painting department was instrumental in shaping the artistic lives of hundreds of students through graduate student studio work, public exhibitions, and youth programs. Drawing entirely from the collections of the Cranbrook Archives, this exhibition is comprised of selections of historic photographs, exhibition announcements and catalogs, press releases, and artists’ correspondence. Highlights include the role Cranbrook painters played in the New Deal arts programs in the 1930s and 1940s, creating numerous murals for public buildings throughout Michigan.

In Michigan, industry and design intertwined creating an epicenter of modern design. Michigan’s visionaries touched nearly every aspect of American life. Detroit’s automobile manufacturers didn’t just produce automobiles; they styled them to become synonymous with the American dream. The state’s furniture manufacturers didn’t just manufacture furniture; they revolutionized the look of the American office and home. Michigan architects Albert Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki didn’t just design buildings; they defined an era.

Michigan’s industry, prosperity, and educational institutions created a synergy that attracted the design talent that formed the foundation for modern American design. This exhibition celebrates Michigan’s outstanding contributions to Modern design and the stories of the people who made it happen. For more information about the Michigan Modern project, click here.

Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America is organized by the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office in association with Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by MPdL Studio. A symposium celebrating Michigan Modern will be held at Cranbrook, June 13-16, 2013.

For his first solo exhibition in Michigan, Danish ceramist Anders Ruhwald will present a series of “site-sensitive” installations in Saarinen House, the “total work of art” designed by the Finnish American architect Eliel Saarinen in 1930. Saarinen House, which Cranbrook Art Museum operates as a historic house museum, will provide the ideal backdrop for Ruhwald’s continued investigations into the nature of Modernism—specifically Scandinavian Modernism—and will serve to heighten the dialogue that his work promotes within the overlapping fields of art, craft, and design. Ruhwald serves as an Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Although Ruhwald has presented other site-sensitive installations in Europe, his interventions into the domestic spaces of Saarinen House, from the iconic dining room to the private rear courtyard, will allow the artist to fully explore Modernism’s construction of the everyday, and what happens to that ideal when it is frozen in time in the fictive environment of a house museum. The exhibition will only be accessible through Cranbrook’s campus tour program, which necessarily means the experience will be mediated by an Art Museum staff member or a volunteer docent—further underlining the tension between the reconstructed historic environment and Ruhwald’s intervention.

The installation will also explore the interpersonal relationships of the Saarinen family, including the father-son dynamic of Eliel and Eero and the link between the two provided by the work of Alvar Aalto.

A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition, which is organized as a collaboration between Cranbrook Art Museum and the new Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.

Cranbrook has a rich history of gate design and fabrication, beginning with George Booth’s 19th-century work as a designer for Barnum Wire & Iron Works in Windsor, Ontario.

From peripheral entrance gates to interior ornamental gates executed in wood, wrought iron, cast iron and steel, over 80 gates have been installed on the campus. These gates—Cranbrook’s “gatescape”—are the focus of the second exhibition in the From the Archives series.

Forging Cranbrook’s Gatescape presents the historical and contemporary uses of gates, and explores the relationship between designer and fabricator, and how the gates of Cranbrook define space and create a visual bridge between the visitor and the architecture.

A Driving Force: Cranbrook and the Car explores the ways in which Cranbrook has played a role in the automobile industry since the start of the twentieth century. Looking at figures such as automobile designer James Scripps Booth and Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate Suzanne Vanderbilt, the exhibition highlights how Cranbrook has helped to define the ultimate symbol of modern America: the car.

At Cranbrook Academy of Art, fundamental questions about painting emerged during the midcentury through the productive tension between the styles of its early painting instructors: Zoltan Sepeshy, a figurative painter, and Wallace Mitchell, an abstractionist. This exhibition mines the dynamic contrast between these two foundational figures in Cranbrook’s history, tracing the effects of their legacy through their own work and that of their students—several of whom went on to careers of national renown.

John Glick is a people’s potter. In a career spanning over five decades, the ceramist has remained committed to the art and craft of functional vessels and their incorporation into the rituals of daily life. John Glick: A Legacy in Clay is the first major exhibition and publication to survey the immense range of ceramic vessels, tableware, and sculpture that has made Glick one of today’s premier figures in American studio pottery. Mounted as the artist closes his historic Plum Tree Pottery in Farmington Hills, Michigan, the exhibition will include nearly 200 pieces representing all phases of his work, from the early vessels and tableware dating to Glick’s time as a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA in Ceramics, 1962), to his conceptual ceramic sculptures from the last decades.  The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are part of the John Glick Legacy Project, which also encompasses the placement of the ceramist’s most important works in public museum collections around the world. The catalogue includes essays by Exhibition Curator Shelley Selim, Independent Curator Jo Lauria, and Ezra Shales, Associate Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Preview the Exhibition

Liz Cohen’s artistic practice is rooted in both photography and performance, and she is perhaps best known for her immersive, ten-year project BODYWORK, which explored low-rider and custom car culture. This exhibition launches a new body of work that draws from her continued interest in exhibitionism, subcultures, and acts of belonging. Her point of departure is an ongoing collaborative research project with a self-described eunuch, who has undergone radical surgical transformations. Cohen will utilize classic documentary tools—interviews, photographs, and video—that will then be drastically altered into textile, sculptural, and image-based forms. Liz Cohen has been the Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art since 2008.

Lecture
LIZ COHEN, ERIC CROSLEY, & THE POLITICS OF THE SELF
February 28, 2016 4:00pm
Liz Cohen, Artist-in-Residence and Head of Photography, Cranbrook Academy of Art
Eric Crosley, Artist and Poet

Please join us for a special lecture by Liz Cohen, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a poetry reading by Eric Crosley, the motivation for her current exhibition, Him, currently on display at Cranbrook Art Museum. Cohen’s work and Crosley’s writing wrestle with the labor of everyday existence and defining “self” as a constantly shifting narrative.