In 1970, shortly after graduating from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Stephen Frykholm joined Herman Miller as its first in-house graphic designer. The modern furniture company was established in 1923 by D.J. De Pree in Zeeland, Michigan, and has manufactured the designs of Cranbrook students and faculty, including Charles and Ray Eames and Eric Chan. Over the course of his forty-some year tenure at Herman Miller, Frykholm helped shape the visual identity of the iconic American company. In 2010, he received the AIGA Medal for excellence in graphic design, the field’s highest honor.

Among Frykholm’s first assignments at Herman Miller was a poster for the company’s annual summer picnic. For this quick assignment Frykholm turned to screen printing, a simple process that he learned while working for the Peace Corps in Aba, Nigeria, at a government trade school. All fifty copies of Frykholm’s 1970 poster were screen-printed in a basement over the course of one night. Its theme of sweet corn was illustrated with co-worker Phil Mitchell’s assistance. Frykholm placed an ear of corn in his mouth, and Mitchell sketched. Frykholm loved the immediacy of screen printing, creating stencils, layering colors, and adding a glossy varnish to each print for a vibrant effect. A great success, the jubilant posters became an annual project for the next twenty years.

Frykholm’s bold use of bright colors, dynamic compositions, and simplified forms harken back to the modern designs of the twentieth-century European object poster, but rendered in a timely Pop art idiom. The poster series translates a variety of popular potluck foods, magnifying and distilling each into its essential form. For the 1982 poster of a seven-layer salad, Frykholm diced its various ingredients and arranged them on a photocopier to better understand their shapes. For the 1983 edition, he scattered the letters of the poster’s title among an ice cream cone’s sprinkles. Frykholm’s playful approach is displayed again in his 1988 design, in which lollypop sticks contain the lyrics to Ben Kweller’s song Lollipop. Like the picnic itself, Stephen Frykholm’s posters are the essence of summer fun.

Essence of Summer: Stephen Frykholm’s Picnic Posters for Herman Miller is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Steffi Duarte, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow. This exhibition is generously supported by the Clannad Foundation.

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Influential street artist Shepard Fairey has been a consistent presence in national and international art scenes since the 1990s. The LA-based artist is perhaps best known locally through his downtown Detroit mural at One Campus Martius, his ubiquitous Hope image created originally as a grassroots activism tool to support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the pervasive We the People poster series for the 2017 Women’s March and beyond.

Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999, considers the first 10 years of Fairey’s artistic practice, and its roots in the graphic language and philosophies of the punk scene. Punk’s ethos played a decisive role in the artist’s early work. “When I discovered punk rock, and realized that music could have an attitude in its style but a specific point of view in its lyrics,” states Fairey, “I became even more interested in how it works as a way of shaping attitudes and culture.”

From 1989 to 1999, the artist adopted many of punk’s biting and playful graphic strategies, as well as its low-tech methods of production and distribution. Fairey created his first Andre the Giant has a Possesticker in a spontaneous DIY manner, appropriating an image of professional wrestler André René Roussimoff (aka André the Giant) from a newspaper. The image would gain iconic status when it spread via friends and fans to city streets across the United States and eventually around the world. The Andre the Giant campaign and image would transform in the mid-1990s into the Obey Giant series, which was inspired by John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror film, They Live (1988) and its plot about subliminal messages implanted in a society in order to control its inhabitants. Taking inspiration from early Russian Constructivist poster designs in particular and from revolutionary propaganda posters in general, Obey Giant prints were posted unsolicited on billboards, buildings, and other parts of the city.

“In Fairey’s earliest works we can see the inheritance of the punk ethos: the satirical impulse, the guerilla-style poster sniping, the oblique references to pop culture, and the very public stage of the street as a place for unapologetic individual expression,” states Blauvelt, Director of the Cranbrook Art Museum. He continues, “Shepard Fairey is a perfect bridge to connect the history of punk graphics that we are also exhibiting at the same time to his seminal work from the 1990s.”

Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999 showcases the artist’s formative years through a variety of posters, stickers, and archival documents showing his engagement with punk. It will also feature a new installation in Cranbrook Art Museum’s galleries created by the artist. ​

The exhibition is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Andrew Blauvelt, Director, and Steffi Duarte, Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow, with assistance from Library Street Collective. Cranbrook Art Museum programs are made possible with generous support from the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, members of the Art Museum Committee, and ArtMembers at Cranbrook.

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is the artist’s first major museum survey that chronicles more than twenty years of work. A critically-acclaimed pioneer in the field of ceramics, Rosen brings a deep knowledge of the material’s history and processes to the realm of contemporary art. Within the genre’s trajectory, Rosen functions as an important link between artists such as Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Jun Kaneko, and Peter Voulkos, as well as a new generation of artists working with the medium.

A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA Ceramics, 1981), Rosen has consistently expanded her practice to encompass installations that meld materiality and process. Her works, whether diminutive or monumental, are composed through laborious additive processes that push the medium beyond spectacle and into dialogues about endurance, labor, and feminist thought, as well as nature, destruction, and regeneration.

The exhibition features more than 100 pieces and includes large-scale works on paper that mirror the trajectory of the work executed in clay. Speaking to dualities of her art, Rosen has said, “Much of the work is made with already fired parts broken, reassembled, re-glazed, and re-fired with the addition of wet clay elements if necessary. I work with a hammer and chisel, and I think of the fired pieces as being as fluid and malleable as wet clay.”

The Cranbrook Art Museum presentation of Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is generously supported by the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation. The exhibition, organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, is made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986, explores the unique visual language of the punk movement from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s through hundreds of its most memorable graphics–flyers, posters, albums, promotions, and zines.

Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression, from the dress and hairstyles of its devotees and the on-stage theatrics of its musicians to the graphic design of its numerous forms of printed matter. As such punk’s energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomena that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art and design.

Arranged thematically, the exhibition is the largest of its kind, and it explores various visual design strategies and techniques, such as appropriation, collage, parody, and pastiche, as well as the influences of genres such as science fiction, horror, and comics. It moves from the sobriety of a stripped down minimalism to the expansive color palettes and expressive forms of new wave.

Examining punk through the lens of graphic design created by both professional and amateur designers, the exhibition will also be punctuated with moments of fashion, contemporary visual art, archival images, videos, and a participatory “concert hall” where visitors can DJ their own vinyl playlist.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, 1976-1986, is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Andrew Blauvelt, Director, and Steffi Duarte, Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow, with the generous assistance of Andrew Krivine. The project is generously supported by the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation.

Drawn from its holdings of more than 6,000 objects of art, design, and craft, Cranbrook Art Museum presents True to Form: Selections from the Permanent Collection. The exhibition includes celebrated favorites alongside newly-acquired works debuting for the first time.

True to Form explores three artistic actions—Capture, Distill, and Disrupt—to make exciting new connections between artworks that span different time periods, materials, genres, and movements. Andy Warhol’s Polaroids of art world glitterati are placed alongside Duane Hanson’s life-like Bodybuilder sculpture; a Harry Bertoia architectural wall relief is complemented by Susan Goethel Campbell’s stark black & white city nightscape, and many more. The exhibition will be on long-term view.

Capture focuses on how artists represent moments from life in both time-based and traditional art materials. For example, Andy Warhol’s Polaroids of art world glitterati are placed alongside Duane Hanson’s joltingly life-like Bodybuider sculpture, thereby unveiling a paradox on realism and authenticity.  Distill explores how simplified forms beget complex readings. For instance, a Harry Bertoia architectural wall relief that accentuates space, light, and shadow is complemented by Susan Goethel Campbell’s stark black & white nightscape of a city that uses these same qualities to depict atmospheric phenomena. The artists in Disrupt augment, replicate, and overlay form and image, as seen in Robert Rauschenberg’s Moon Burn and Romare Bearden’s Tidings—two artworks that utilize photo-collage techniques to convey the multi-layered experience of social and cultural life.

True to Form: Selections from the Permanent Collection is made possible with generous support from the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation. The exhibition is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Laura Mott, Curator of Contemporary Art and Design with assistance by the CAM Education Department.

The most innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2018 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 more than 70 graduates as they launch their careers. A special ArtMembers Opening Reception will be held on April 21 from 6-9pm. Memberships may be purchased here or at the door that evening. Non-members can purchase a ticket at the door for $20.

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In August of 2017, Ryan McGinness worked with Bedrock, the Quicken Loans Community Investment Fund (QLCIF), Tony Hawk and Library Street Collective to produce Wayfinding, an art installation and skate park in the city of Detroit. The park was designed by Tony Hawk, and built by George Leichtweis of Modern Skate and Surf.

Located on the site of the future Monroe Blocks development, the area bounded by Randolph Street, Bates Street, Cadillac Square and Monroe Avenue, Wayfinding opened to the public on Wednesday, August 16. The park is scheduled to remain open until Monroe Blocks construction begins, currently slated for January 2018. Wayfinding’s functional and mobile design will allow it to move to another location in the city following the Monroe Blocks groundbreaking.

As part of Cranbrook Art Museum’s participation, we have partnered with Ryan Myers-Johnson, Director of the Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts, to produce two on-site live performances. They include:

Saturday, September 30, 7 pm: A 3D tilt brush performative installation

Saturday, October 7, 6-8pm: Maya Stovall, “Manifesto #3” and Marcus Elliot, “Beyond Rebellious Ensemble.”

Performances are free and open to the public.

The park, which was designed to maximize fun as well as function, will include six skate-able elements inspired by Detroit as well as a viewing area for spectators. Admission is free, and all equipment will be provided. For more information about the park, visit their website.

Keith Haring: The End of the Line will open at Cranbrook Art Museum 30 years after the artist created his landmark temporary mural at the museum in 1987. He considered that project one of his best, and it marked a new direction in his visual language that continued until his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 31. Documentation of this pivotal project will be presented alongside two bodies of work anticipated by the mural and made in collaboration with acclaimed beat poet William S. Burroughs—Apocalypse (1988) and The Valley (1989).

Haring became a widely-celebrated artist for his comic-like drawings and paintings in the New York subways in the 1980s. At his lecture at Cranbrook on September 25, 1987, Haring discussed his intentions in these early subway explorations: “I started making drawings that were figurative after doing abstract work for almost five years, and for the first time, it seemed like I had made something that made sense to be in public because it had a kind of communicative power. [It] seemed like they should be in places where people could see them and think about them.” Haring’s Subway Drawings were ephemeral works that were documented by his friend and fellow artist Tseng Kwong Chi. A selection of these photographs along with a rare, surviving example of one Haring’s large-scale subway drawings, still intact on its advertising panel, will be on view.

The End of The Line concentrates on the last years of Haring’s life, when his work and activism got intensely personal after being diagnosed with AIDS. The Cranbrook mural introduced stylistic shifts of intentional drips and blotches, but it also depicted characters he continued to explore in Apocalypse and The Valley, such as jesters, masks, skulls, martyrs, and other religious icons. Entrenched in thoughts and philosophies about the end of times, Haring’s later works have art historical kinship with the chaotic storytelling of Hieronymus Bosch and violent playfulness of his friend and contemporary Jean-Michael Basquiat. The ominous texts by Burroughs stationed alongside them complement the energy of Haring’s drawings, which have the frenzy of an artist trying to process life before its end.

Cranbrook Art Museum presents Liquor Store Theatre Performance Films by Detroit-based artist Maya Stovall, an innovator who works across the disciplines of dance, theory, anthropology, ethnography, and contemporary art. The museum will feature films from this series of site-specific dance interventions that began in 2014, as well as premiere a new film created in summer 2017 for the exhibition.

In Liquor Store Theatre, Stovall situates her stage in the public parking lots, sidewalks, and streets in front of liquor stores in her McDougall-Hunt neighborhood in Detroit. In an area with few operating storefronts, the liquor stores have become the de-facto centers of commerce, including groceries and electronics, and a place for residents to socialize. The unannounced performances include herself and several dancers that perform a meditative-style of ballet and jazz with the occasional bystander joining in the movement. Beyond the dancer’s bodies, the performance ruptures the stilted choreography of daily life for the people in the neighborhood—a moment of curiosity and spectacle just for them. After each performance, Stovall engages her audience in conversation and documents their personal experiences, musings, and predictions on Detroit’s socioeconomic condition and future. Dance is not the objective, but a conduit for communication and reflection.

Cranbrook Art Museum is the first tour stop of the exhibition Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-1980, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

The exhibition includes the entire cache of works made by Jean-Michel Basquiat during the year he lived with his friend Alexis Adler in a small apartment in the East Village. This archival material provides rare insight into the artistic life of Basquiat before he was recognized as a prominent painter in the early 1980s. While living in this apartment, Basquiat’s creative impulses moved fluidly from his SAMO tags on the surrounding streets and neighborhood into a more sustained practice in their shared home. Through paintings, sculpture, works on paper, a notebook, and other ephemera, as well as Adler’s numerous photographs from this period, this exhibition explores how the context of life in New York informed and formed Basquiat’s artistic practice.

As Adler notes, “From mid-1979 to mid-1980, I lived with Jean in three different apartments, but for most of that time in an apartment that we moved into and shared on East 12th St. This was a time before Jean had canvases to work with, so he used whatever he could get his hands on, as he was constantly creating. The derelict streets of the East Village provided his raw materials and he would bring his finds up the six flights of stairs to incorporate into his art. Jean was able to make money for paint and his share of the rent, which was $80 a month, by selling sweatshirts on the street. He knew that he was a great artist.”

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue present New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the prism of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art and provide a window into the art-rich time that he emerged from as well as impacted so profoundly. It will sharpen and deepen our understanding of this artist at a vital yet mostly unknown, or at least under-discussed, moment of his career. Ultimately, this exhibition will attest to Basquiat’s virtuosity in formation—the creative impulses that yielded a distinctive voice, but also the many diversions or paths he explored as he was developing a signature style.

Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12^th Street, 1979-1980 is presented at Cranbrook Art Museum contemporaneously alongside three other solo exhibitions by artists that all operate at the intersection of art and street culture: Ryan McGinness: Studio Views; Keith Haring: The End of the Line; and Maya Stovall: Liquor Store Theatre Performance Films.