Organized by Cranbrook Art Museum with assistance from Library Street Collective.

Wayfinding: An Art Installation + Skate Park by Ryan McGinness and Tony Hawk

Acclaimed contemporary artist Ryan McGinness is coming to the Detroit area with an ambitious exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum and public project in downtown Detroit that mines the city’s creative past for the present. At Cranbrook Art Museum in November 2017, he will premiere the exhibition Ryan McGinness: Studio Views, which consists of a large-scale installation based on his studio practice and a presentation of drawings and iconography created from artworks in the Museum’s collection.

McGinness’s creative origins are from skateboarding culture in the mid-1990s that evolved into an expansive graphic design and studio art career. From early on, he understood the power of iconography and was influenced by the symbols one encounters in street signage, corporate logos, and popular culture. Whether creating simple design graphics or cacophonously layered paintings, the core of McGinness’s creative process consists of distilling imagery ranging from everyday objects to dreamscapes—the mundane and the absurd—into its basic characteristics of shape, form, and composition. He creates forms of communication that are not dependent on spoken language, but are rather visual ideograms of contemporary life.

In mindful proximity to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Ryan McGinness: Studio Views is an exhibition about artistic process and a glimpse into McGinness’ studio practice. The Main Gallery at Cranbrook Art Museum will consist of 35 new paintings that immerse the viewer inside a stylized panorama of the artist’s studio. With a shared horizon of the studio floor, each painting depicts a scene of artworks and objects under construction; however, this visualization of process is in fact the final artwork. In the center of the gallery, McGinness has bolted together used silkscreens to create a physical maze for viewers to explore and discover a series of small sculptures. In an adjacent gallery, McGinness will present Collection Views, a series of new icons inspired by art and design objects that the artist has selected from the museum’s collection. The display will also include the artist’s preparatory sketches created in the development of this new iconography.

Throughout all of these projects, McGinness makes legible the individual elements of each subject—whether the artist’s studio, the museum’s collection, or a piece of the city’s history—offering the viewer new insights into how the artist approaches the world like a visual puzzle.

Ryan McGinness: Studio Views 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: Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12^th Street, 1979-1980 (traveling from MCA Denver); Keith Haring: The End of the Line; and Maya Stovall: Liquor Store Theatre Performance Films.

Cranbrook: A New Domestic Landscape examines the role of designed objects that define and animate our interior environments. The exhibition features contemporary furniture and furnishings by recent alumni and Artists-in-Residence of Cranbrook Academy of Art that challenge conventions of use, explore new materials and techniques, and blur the boundaries between art, craft, and design.

Long a hotbed of experimental design, Cranbrook has played an important role in envisioning artifacts for living—from the handcrafted production of the Arts and Crafts period and the birth of mid-century modernism in America to the art furniture movement of the 1980s. Today, this progressive approach continues with artists, architects, and designers who expand these legacies of handcrafted production, custom fabrication, and experiments in form, materials, and processes in their own unique ways.

The exhibition takes its title from the landmark 1972 exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Just as Ambasz had argued for a heterogeneous approach to design that challenged its modern orthodoxy of “form follows function,” contemporary producers continue many of its avant-garde experiments, but with a renewed sense of material experimentation and a continued contestation of an object’s symbolic meaning, ritual use, and functional constraints.

The exhibition features work from:

In recognition of Finland’s centennial of independence, Cranbrook Art Museum presents Finland 100: The Cranbrook Connection, an exhibition examining the profound influence this country has had on the development of the arts in America.

Design has always been a special strength of Finnish culture, exemplified by the Cranbrook campus itself. When designing Cranbrook, architect Eliel Saarinen blended vernacular Finnish romanticism from his native Kirkkonummi, Finland, with the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles prominent in America at the time. Saarinen’s comprehensive philosophy that one should design in the context of the next larger thing—from the chair to the room to the house to the city—meant that no element of the built environment should be overlooked. Thus, he and his talented family designed Cranbrook as a “total work of art,” which the New York Times has called “one of the greatest campuses ever created anywhere in the world.”

The exhibition features many treasures of Cranbrook’s history, including exquisite architectural renderings by Eliel Saarinen, intricate weavings by his wife Loja, and furniture and furnishings by his children, Eero and Pipsan. Also included are works by Finnish-born artists-in-residence at Cranbrook, such as Maija Grotell, head of ceramics, and Marianne Strengell, the head of the fiber department. Visitors to Cranbrook, such as the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, also exerted an important influence in the development of modern design at Cranbrook and beyond.

Cranbrook Art Museum presents the U.S. debut of this career retrospective of Alexander Girard (1907–1993), one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century. Girard worked across the fields of architecture, interior design, textiles, and graphics to create stunning environments that greatly enriched the visual language of mid-century modernism. Girard returned color, texture, decoration, the handmade and even opulence to classic modernism, making him an important touchstone for today’s artists and designers. After to moving to Michigan in 1937, Girard established a design office and retail space in Grosse Pointe. Although he relocated to New Mexico in 1953, Girard kept his ties to Michigan as head the textile and fabric division of Herman Miller, headquartered in Zeeland, Michigan—a major purveyor of modern design worldwide. He collaborated with many designers and architects such as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and George Nelson, among others.

This landmark exhibition presents hundreds of examples of Girard’s work, including furniture, textiles, graphics, architecture, and sculptures, as well as drawings and collages never shown before. In addition, the show presents hundreds of folk art objects that he collected from all over the world and from which he drew inspiration.

The most innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2017 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 60 graduates as they launch their careers.

We are counting down the days to the opening by presenting artwork by each of the exhibiting students on Instagram!
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From the Vault is a series of exhibitions drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works of modern and contemporary art, architecture, craft, and design. For this installment of the series, we have chosen to focus on a small but significant sampling of recent and promised gifts to the Museum that help highlight key aspects of our unique and diverse collection.

On display are key works from distinguished graduates of Cranbrook Academy of Art, one of the nation’s leading graduate programs, which constitutes a major focus of our collection. You will also find other outstanding examples of modern and contemporary art by key figures of the twentieth century that enhance our ability to tell a more comprehensive story.

Work by important twentieth-century masters such as Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson, Anni Albers, Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschenberg will be on display alongside work by acclaimed Cranbrook Academy of Art artists and alumna Eero Saarinen (Instructor, 1939-1941), Charles Eames (Student, Architecture, 1938–1939, CAA Instructor of Design, 1939–1941), Harry Bertoia (Student, Silver and Metalsmithing, 1937; CAA Manager and Instructor in the Metalcraft Shop, 1937–1943; CAA Instructor of Graphic Art, 1942–1943), Ebi Baralaye (Ceramics ’16), Donald Lipski (Ceramics ’73), Ed Fella (Design ’87), McArthur Binion (Painting ’73), José Joya (Painting ‘57), and Sonya Clark (Fiber ’95).

Without the generosity of donors, whose names you will find on individual wall labels in this exhibition, we would not be able to share with you and future generations the art of our time.

Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms draws its inspiration from traditional museum period rooms, reinventing that presentation model by featuring distinct spaces that examine key moments in Cranbrook’s history. As a contemporary interpretation of such spaces, this exhibition features four distinct rooms that examine key moments in the evolution of the twentieth-century domestic landscape:

The Naturalist’s Athenaeum

Devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement that inspired Cranbrook’s founders, George and Ellen Scripps Booth, in the early 20th century, The Naturalist’s Athenaeum explores the ethos of the movement and the study of the natural world. The athenaeum, a sanctuary reserved for literary and scientific learning, is inhabited by artworks, handicraft objects, rare books and natural specimens that speak to a mindset that champions the intricacies of nature and human skill without the interference of technological production and artificiality.

The Bachelor Pad

Evoking mid-century modernism in America birthed at Cranbrook Academy of Art, The Bachelor Pad consists of two spaces: an exterior courtyard sculpture garden and an interior environment indicative of an idealized unmarried man. This space contrasts a familiar design narrative with a subtext of how a new modernist masculinity was constructed through consumer goods. The room is populated with furniture by modern masters such as George Nelson, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames and seemingly benign objects—ashtrays, tumblers, cocktail shakers—that were propagated by magazines like Playboy as assertions of maleness.

The Cosmic Cave

A look into the experimental living environments of the 1970s, The Cosmic Cave is an immersive experience that takes its inspiration from speculative thinking of the era, including time travel, transcendental meditation, and the Afrofuturist philosophies of Sun Ra. A psychedelic living environment by Cranbrook alum Urban Jupena (Cave Rug, 1970) envelops the space and is accompanied by artworks ranging from ancient Egyptian artifacts to a sound work by contemporary artist Ingrid LaFleur. The space is a physical experiment in collapsing the past, present, and future.

A Semiotic Funhouse

The exploration of how an object’s form could be derived from its content or meaning, referred to as “product semantics,” was pioneered at Cranbrook in the 1980s. In A Semiotic Funhouse, pluralistic notions of taste are addressed in a room of furniture, graphics, and product models dedicated to the postmodernist sensibilities of historical reference, linguistic play, geometric formalism, and the anti-aesthetic of bad taste.

Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth Century Period Rooms includes work by Cranbrook Academy of Art artists Pipsan Saarinen Swanson (Instructor of Weaving and Textile Design, 1932–1933, 1935), Eero Saarinen (Instructor, 1939-1941), Urban Jupena (Fiber ’70), Terence Main (Design ’78), Paul Montgomery (Design ’87), David Gresham (Design ’86), Kenneth R. Krayer, Jr. (Design ’88), Lisa Krohn (Design ’88), David Frej (Design ’89), Tony Rosenthal (Sculpture ’39), Lyman Kipp (Sculpture ’54), Peter Stathis (Design ’89), Toshiko Takaezu (Ceramics ’54), and Michael McCoy (Artist-in-Residence and Co-Chairman, Department of Design, ’71–’95).

This exhibition is the third installment in a series of shows, including the Cranbrook Hall of Wonders and The Cranbrook Salon, which showcase works from our collections presented through contemporary interpretations of historical museum display techniques.

Edward Gorey’s masterful pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate his captivating books conjure a vaguely Edwardian world of handcars, boater hats, and Dickensian children. With titles such as The Hapless Child, The Loathsome Couple, and The Fatal Lozenge, Gorey’s protagonists often meet an untimely demise. Despite the subject matter, his work transcends the mere macabre, offering instead a dark humor that has found contemporary resonance with cultural phenomena from Goth and steampunk to Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton. Although Gorey’s métier was the illustrated novel, his talent and reach extended to other creative realms, including his Tony Award-winning and hauntingly beautiful stage sets and costumes for a 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey features many of his famed publications, including several elaborately designed artist’s books and other assorted ephemera and memorabilia.

Often referred to as the transient evidence of everyday life, ephemera is primary source material that spans the entire range of printing and social history, offering direct evidence of our cultural, social, industrial, and technological histories. Because the Cranbrook Archives’ collection of ephemera is so rich and varied, this exhibition focuses on ephemera that illustrates Cranbrook’s social life during the 20th century.

Ranging from printed matter for theatrical productions, family and alumni reunions, and school athletic events, to lecture series and science and art museum exhibitions, these documents present a visually compelling story of the way in which the Cranbrook community has represented its preoccupations, cultural perceptions, and identity over the past century. This is the first of several exhibitions that will feature ephemera from the collections of the Cranbrook Archives.

The most innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2016 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 80 graduates as they launch their careers.