Cranbrook and the camera grew up together. In the 1920s, as George and Ellen Booth were realizing their dream of a community dedicated to art, science, and education, amateur filmmaking flourished as a newly affordable hobby. These two historical trajectories—that of an educational community and of a medium that has shaped the cultural experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—intersect in Cranbrook Goes to the Movies.

The vintage films featured in this exhibition bring the diverse history of Cranbrook’s campus alive in a way never before experienced; through the actual people and objects that populated it. Archival film can feel distant, a relic of days past, and historic objects are too often divorced from their time period and their context. Cranbrook Goes to the Movies reunites the material with the ephemeral, giving physical presence to the vintage films that document life at Cranbrook and placing some of Cranbrook’s treasures in their historic context. An immersive experience, Cranbrook Goes to the Movies provides an avenue into Cranbrook’s past built not on dry text and static images but on the vitality and movements of the people who lived it.

Throughout a career spanning over half a century, former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and instructor Ken Isaacs (b. 1927) radically deconstructed conventional notions of modernism. His Living Structures—hand-made, low-cost, multifunctional furniture and architectural units—challenged ideas of how people could sit, work, and live within their own homes and the broader built environment. Culture Breakers: The Living Structures of Ken Isaacs highlights Isaacs’s time in the 1950s at Cranbrook as both student and head of the Design Department, his experimentations as an educator with environmental learning, and his role within the countercultural community of the 1960s and 1970s, when he gained wider recognition for his populist approach to design.

Featuring works on paper, photographs, film, architectural models, and several reproduced Living Structures—including his earliest configuration which was presented at the 1954 Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate Degree show—this exhibition examines Isaacs’s role as a nonconformist who created simple, economical, functional systems of living that could be built by anyone. By spreading his designs through mass-instruction instead of mass-production, Isaacs encouraged a do-it-yourself outlook that empowered consumers through the act of making.

Andy Warhol envisioned the record cover as a means to popularize his name as an artist and, once he reached iconic status in the 1960s, used it to directly impact popular culture. Designed to be collected by the masses, the records—numbering more than fifty— reinforce his maxim “repetition adds up to reputation.” While only a fortunate few own a Warhol painting, millions own his design for Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

The exhibition is drawn from the Cranbrook Art Museum’s preeminent collection of record covers by Andy Warhol, a recent gift by Frank M. Edwards and Ann M. Williams, and premieres three recently discovered covers that have never before been exhibited, including a cover recently discovered last year. Cranbrook has also been loaned a copy of the one-of-a-kind “Night Beat” album cover, making this the most comprehensive exhibition of authenticated record covers to date.  The album covers range from the extremely rare to the widely recognizable; together they offer a unique lens to survey the artist’s career from a young graphic designer to a cultural phenomenon. At the same time, the exhibition documents the history of the mass-produced vinyl record and the zeitgeist of these eras through the inclusion of music, video and artworks from the Art Museum’s extensive Andy Warhol collection.  Listening booths in the gallery will allow viewers to play select albums, thereby producing an experience between the cover art and the music—rock, classical, opera, jazz, soul, experimental—the way Warhol intended.  The exhibition also includes album covers by other musicians that have controversially appropriated Warhol’s imagery and testify to his influence on subsequent generations.

This first comprehensive survey of Paul Evans’s work, this exhibition will document Evans’s role in the midcentury American studio furniture movement, his approach to furniture as sculpture and abstract composition, and his unremitting new approaches to metal. Opening earlier this year at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and then traveling to Cranbrook Art Museum—the only other venue for the exhibition—Paul Evans: Crossing Boundaries and Crafting Modernism will be comprised of some sixty-eight works, spanning the artist’s entire career. It includes choice examples of Evans’s early metalwork and jewelry, collaborative pieces made by Evans and Phillip Lloyd Powell during the fifties when they shared a studio, as well as a comprehensive selection of Evans’s studio work representing his sculpted steel; verdigris copper; copper, bronze and pewter; argenté sculpted bronze, and cityscape techniques. The show will also include examples of Evans’s sculpture as well as a selection of work he produced for Directional Furniture Company. The presentation at Cranbrook Art Museum will include work by Evans’s contemporaries selected from Cranbrook’s permanent collection, including the celebrated Shuey Collection, placing his pioneering designs for furniture with the context of concurrent trends in midcentury art and design.

Paul Evans studied Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1952 and 1953, working with Artist-in-Residence Richard Thomas.

Coveted Objects, the first solo exhibition in Michigan by the Detroit-based artist and metalsmith Lauren Kalman, explores issues of taste and desire that inform our sensibilities towards the body and design objects. The exhibition consists of a selection of photographs and props used in staged vignettes featuring painted-gold bodies that contort, shape, and interact with Modernist furniture. In most of the images, Kalman undertakes these physical feats herself, drawing attention to the objectification of the female body and its relationship to the patriarchal lineage of Modernism. By positioning both the figures and objects within this context, the artist questions our constructs of beauty and the ideologies that underlie our contemporary built environment.

The works in Coveted Objects are from Kalman’s most recent series titled If The Crime is Beautiful…. The project is derived from the Viennese architect Adolf Loos’s infamous lecture Ornament and Crime from 1910, in which he proposed that ornamentation is an indication of a primitive and regressive society. His philosophy advocating the simplification of form and absence of decoration influenced the Modernist movements in art, design, and architecture—an aesthetic Kalman approaches with both critique and admiration.

Lauren Kalman received her MFA in Art and Technology from Ohio State University and a BFA with a focus in Metals from the Massachusetts College of Art. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The exhibition is part of an ongoing series curated by Laura Mott, Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, which presents the work of vibrant emerging and mid-career contemporary artists with a special focus on Detroit-based artists and graduates from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Bend is a solo exhibition by contemporary jewelry artist Iris Eichenberg, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.  As a point of departure, Eichenberg revisited her artistic practice, which is renowned for its diverse collections and challenges to the definitions of craft and jewelry; the result is an unconventional retrospective of her twenty-five-year career told through a body of new work. Decades in the making, this exhibition is an introspective look at the alchemic process of creation and the artist’s life-long research into the behavior of materials.

The exhibition’s title, Bend, speaks to the language of the body and the artist’s material choices—gold, brass, rusted steel, textile, and mirrored glass—as well as Eichenberg’s circuitous path as a jewelry artist.   Eichenberg has described her process as “drawing in materials” and for this exhibition she has sketched on a more monumental scale.  The exhibition features life-size enlargements of work the artist previously executed though the jewelry-making process, thereby becoming sculptural anomalies that enact the body and ornament at the same time.

Kinetic sensibilities and movement is integral to the work.  While some objects literally expand and collapse with the assistance of rotating motors, others simply anticipate action like a musical instrument without its sound.  Every object she creates denotes the action of a verb similar to the way the body is not understood until it moves: an elbow, for instance, is a thing but its ‘elbowness’ is dependent on its ability to bend.  Eichenberg’s years of experimentation with heat, gravity, malleability, and surface inform these character studies of materials and create portraits of both their potential and limits, while at the same time expanding our understanding of their relationship to the human form and temperament.

Iris Eichenberg graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she later became head of the Jewelry Department.  Since 2007, she has been the Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.  Her work is represented in numerous national and international museum collections including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Schmuck Museum in Pforzheim, Germany; the Fondation National d’Art Contemporain in Paris; The Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden; the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Rotasa Foundation in Mill Valley, California.

The Cranbrook Hall of Wonders draws its inspiration from the precursor to the modern museum: the “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Wunderkammer,” a sixteenth-century collecting and display technique in which art, ornate functional objects, natural oddities, and anthropological discoveries co-existed together as a microcosm of knowledge. This contemporary interpretation is a floor-to-ceiling installation featuring Cranbrook Art Museum’s preeminent collection of artworks, design, and craft objects from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exhibited alongside cultural properties from Cranbrook’s historic campus, and inspired selections from the vast holdings of Cranbrook Institute of Science. From the sculpture of Claes Oldenburg to antique navigational tools to Arts and Crafts pottery, the Hall of Wonders combines seemingly disparate objects to explore new avenues of display and context, shaping compelling vignettes that—in the spirit of its Renaissance-era predecessors—seek to captivate, provoke, and amaze.

In the spring, summer, and fall of 2015, Cranbrook Art Museum and Detroit served as the backdrop for Nick Cave’s most ambitious project to date – Nick Cave: Here Hear. At the invitation of Cranbrook Art Museum, Cave staged seven months of events throughout the city of Detroit anchored by his first solo exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum. Cave is a 1989 graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art. Cave has said that the time he spent in Detroit was critical to his growth as an artist. He returned to capture the positive energy currently enveloping the city. “Detroit continues to be an always-surprising environment of creativity, excitement, and engagement,” says Cave. In Detroit, he launched his largest performance series ever. His Soundsuits invaded the city for a series of photo shoots; he staged Dance Labs in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD); he worked with LBGTQ youth and young adults from the Ruth Ellis Center to create Up Right: Detroit, a performance filmed in the city; and he engaged students from the Detroit School of Arts and the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy to produce Heard•Detroit, a procession of 30 life-size horse sculptures operated by 60 high school dancers who will paraded and performed along Detroit’s riverfront. Cave’s project culminated at the end of the exhibition in October, when the artist staged Figure This: Detroit, a massive public performance at Detroit’s Masonic Temple.

Cranbrook Art Museum served as the producer for the entire Nick Cave project, and was home to the exhibition Nick Cave: Here Hear, that included a 7,000-square-foot exhibition of Soundsuits, recent sculptures, and newly commissioned artworks. The exhibition was on view from June 20 through October 11, 2015. A full weekend of celebrations occurred for the exhibition opening, including a film screening and block party performances in Detroit’s Brightmoor community on June 21. Nick Cave: Here Hear is curated by Laura Mott, Curator of Contemporary Art and Design at Cranbrook Art Museum.

Soundsuit Invasion Photo Shoots

Various Locations
April and May 2015

Soundsuit Invasion Photo Shoots featured the artist Nick Cave being photographed in Soundsuits at iconic Detroit locations. The photographs were published as a book titled Nick Cave: Greetings From Detroit—inspired by vintage postcards—depicting the city of Detroit from the perspective of creative positivity. The book was designed by Bob Faust, photographed by Corine Vermeulen with an essay by Laura Mott.

Locations: Dequindre Cut, Brightmoor, the Parade Company, Mexicantown, the African Bead Museum, Eastern Market, The Fisher Building, One Woodward, Mike Kelly Homestead at MOCAD, Cranbrook, Masonic Temple, and the Michigan Automotive Plant.

Brightmoor Community Events

The Redford Theatre and The Artist Village
Detroit, MI
June 21, 2015

The day after Nick Cave: Here Hear opened to the public at Cranbrook Art Museum, a celebration was held in Detroit to kick-off this ambitious project. There was a screening of Nick Cave’s video work at the historic Redford Theatre. The screening was followed by a celebration at The Artist Village Detroit – filled with food, music, and dancers in Soundsuits, who joined the party in an impromptu flash-mob. The event is a collaborative effort with the Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts and engaged the Brightmoor, Old Redford and Northwest Detroit communities.

Schedule

2-3pm: Screening of Nick Cave video work at the Redford Theatre.
3pm: Gabriel Brass Band and dancers will lead a procession of the audience from the theatre into Artist Village.
3-4pm: Gabriel Brass Band performs in the large courtyard of the Artist Village.
4-4:45pm: Passalacqua performs
5-5:45pm: Tunde Olaniran performs

Performances by dancers in soundsuits occured throughout the afternoon. Free and open to the public.

Nick Cave: Here Hear

Cranbrook Art Museum Upper Galleries
June 20 to October 11, 2015

Nick Cave is a prolific artist and dancer, famous for his sculptures called Soundsuits, which he often stages in public spectacle. The artist conceives some as fragile sculptural totems, and others as wearable performance suits designed for sound, mobility, and dance. Though influenced by a vibrant palette of African art, armor, found objects, fashion, and textile design, the origin of the Soundsuit is rooted in social critique. Cave first created a suit in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating in 1991, envisioning an emotional shield that protected one’s race or gender while still expressing individuality. As Cave’s artwork began to resonate with vast audiences, the artist saw the Soundsuits as powerful agents to capture the public imagination on a monumental scale. Cave’s artistic practice now advocates the vital importance of collective dreaming, which he actualizes through large-scale performances.

Here Hear includes a collection of approximately thirty sculptural Soundsuits in the main gallery arranged in a dynamic vignette. It also includes a room of seven newly commissioned artworks surrounded by a new site-specific wall-based tapestry inspired by Cave’s childhood watching the night sky. An additional gallery will feature a selection of his recent sculpture work and a separate area will display the artist’s video work. Finally, the “Map in Action” room will serve as a hub for the Detroit Performance Series and display the wearable Soundsuits that will come and go to performances throughout the city of Detroit. Video footage of the performances will be added to the room throughout the duration of the show, thereby becoming a living document of the entire project.

Nick Cave: Here Hear is curated by Laura Mott, Curator of Contemporary Art and Design at Cranbrook Art Museum.

Dance Labs

Rehearsals at MOCAD and final performances in Detroit.
July 13 to August 1, 2015

Cranbrook Art Museum partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) to present three Dance Labs designed by Nick Cave. He paired three local dance companies with three musicians to create their own choreographed works with his extraordinary sculptures. The rehearsals at MOCAD were open to viewers, and the three public performances were staged in locations throughout the city.

Public performance schedule:

Sunday, July 19
The Ruth Ellis Center
Highland Park, MI

Choreographer: Marcus White
Musician: DJ John Collins

Sunday, July 26
The Dequindre Cut (under the East Lafayette overpass)
Detroit, MI

Choreographer: Biba Bell
Musician: Frank Pahl

Friday, July 31, 6:30-7:30 pm (Free Admission)
Campus Martius
Detroit, MI
Held in conjunction with the Campus Martius beach party event.

Choreographer: Hardcore Detroit
Musician: Odu Afrobeat Orchestra

Dance Lab rehearsals took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and were open to viewing by the public.

Community Partners

Up Right: Detroit

World Film Premiere
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Detroit, MI
September 24

The exclusive world film premiere of Nick Cave’s Up Right: Detroit took place on September 24, 2015 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. All proceeds from the event benefited Cranbrook Art Museum education programs.

Up Right: Detroit is a short feature film conceived by Nick Cave as an “act of initiation” and a preparation of the mind, body, spirit, and selfhood of a group of young adults from the Ruth Ellis Center. The participants undergo a ritual of being costumed in elaborate soundsuits and enter the city, transformed. Filmed at the historic Michigan Theatre.

The evening included an opening reception with Cave, the film premiere, and a Q&A with Nick Cave and Curator Laura Mott following the film.

Community Partners

Heard•Detroit

Milliken State Park, Detroit
September 26, 2015

As a continuation of his performance series, Cranbrook Art Museum presented Nick Cave’s Heard•Detroit on Saturday, September 26 at Milliken State Park in Detroit.

Working in partnership with the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy and the Michigan DNR Outdoor Adventure Center, the project featured 30 life-size horse sculptures performing along the Detroit riverfront. The sculptures were operated by 60 dancers from the Detroit School of Arts and the Maggie Allesee Department of Theater and Dance at Wayne State University. According to Cave, the project was intended to be “a dreamlike vision that stops everyday life for a collective transformative moment.”

Community Partners

Education Programs

March – October 2015

Drawing inspiration from Cave’s Soundsuits, Cranbrook Art Museum has created educational programs for teachers, school groups, and individual students. Teachers will have access to a free, interdisciplinary curriculum featuring videos of Nick Cave discussing his art, the creative process, and identity of self and place: Nick Cave: Exploring Identity through the Arts. School groups can attend The Costume Cave Workshop, creating their own costume pieces. Individual students can register for Nick Cave inspired Summer Programs. As part of the education series, selected classes will be invited to participate in Nick Cave’s Figure This: Detroit and perform live!

Figure This: Detroit

Detroit Masonic Temple
Detroit, MI
October 4, 2015

The project culminated with Figure This: Detroit, a large-scale performance comprised of the dances and music from the Dance Labs and a presentation by children of their Cave-inspired creations. This final performance was a free event in Detroit’s Masonic Temple for an audience of hundreds.

The event featured performances from Marcus White/White Werx, DJ John Jammin Collins, Biba Bell, Frank Pahl, Hardcore Detroit, the ODÙ Afrobeat Orchestra and concluded with a performance by Tunde Olaniran.

Figure This: Detroit also included the premiere of two films by The Right Brothers: “Up Right: Detroit” and a special recording of “Heard•Detroit.”

In commemoration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia is the first museum exhibition devoted to Harry Bertoia’s designs for jewelry. The former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and metalsmithing instructor has received international acclaim for his metal furniture and sculpture, but his exploration of the medium originated in jewelry design while still a high school student in Detroit. Out of the hundreds of jewelry pieces attributed to Bertoia, the majority was produced during his years at Cranbrook, and this display of over thirty works offers an early glimpse of a creative vision that would crystallize as his career matured.  Additionally, several early monotype prints are featured to illustrate how the artist harnessed the same intuitive and experimental approach to making in his planographic compositions. The objects in this exhibition highlight Bertoia’s investigations of form, dimension, and material on a concentrated and bankable scale—establishing him as a pioneer of the American Studio Jewelry movement and a master of elevating fashionable adornment to objets d’art.

The exhibition opened with an exclusive ArtMembers’ reception on March 13, from 6-8pm, featuring a lecture from Celia Bertoia, Harry Bertoia’s youngest daughter and director of the Harry Bertoia Foundation.

The Cranbrook Salon is the second installment of an ongoing series that explores Cranbrook’s collections through the history of exhibition design. This display draws its inspiration from the salon-style hanging technique, which originated in late seventeenth-century Paris at the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In order to accommodate the great quantity of works submitted to the annual student exhibition, the paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling. The exhibition later relocated to the Salon Carré (Square Salon) at the Louvre, and the event—and its mode of display—eventually adapted its name from the venue.

This contemporary installation explores the salon as a mind map, constructing thematic connections and groupings from artworks that span wide-ranging stylistic movements and time periods. While the handheld gallery guide provides insight into these groupings, viewers are also invited to explore the exhibition with minds open to discovery, forging their own associations between these works of art.

The Cranbrook Salon is accompanied by a series of events orchestrated by The Detroit Bluestocking Crew, a collective of female creatives organized for this exhibition. These programs activate another historic model of the term salon—a gathering for socialization and the exchange of ideas. Both within this gallery and in locations throughout the city of Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum will present lively programs co-hosted by performers, writers, and scholars from the region.