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.

Theater of the Mind sets its scene in the imagination with artworks that conjure time-based dramaturgies that play out in the mind and entice speculative thinking. The term “theater of the mind” is used to describe a strategy of self-hypnosis in which one visualizes themself as an actor projected on a screen, thereby simultaneously becoming the protagonist and the audience. Similarly, the artists and designers in the exhibition each have created works that are actualized in the viewer’s imagination and produce narratives that are not tangibly visible, yet lucid and vibrant.

The exhibition includes seminal artworks by Bruce Nauman, Roni Horn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anthony McCall, the British design collective Dunne & Raby/Michael Anastassiades, among others. Theater of the Mind also features new work by Marcelline Delbecq and Adam Lee Miller, as well as an ambitious site-specific commission by Finnish artist Hans Rosenström, who will create an immersive sound installation based on personal and archival research at Cranbrook.

This exhibition is the culmination of a two-week project involving The Truth Booth, a portable, inflatable video recording studio in the shape of a giant speech bubble developed by The Cause Collective. The booth toured eleven locations in Metro Detroit and Flint, Michigan, in the summer of 2016.

At each location, participants had up to two minutes to record a statement starting with the words, “The Truth Is…”. The recorded results of this project, numbering nearly one thousand, have been used to create an ambitious 60-foot-wide video installation. Accompanying the video will be documentation of the regional Truth Booth tour by photographer Corine Vermeulen (a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art) and video by Detroit-based filmmakers The Right Brothers.

The exhibition will also include a participatory room by The Cause Collective allowing museum visitors to write their own responses to the question “The Truth Is…” on helium-filled speech-bubble balloons.

The Truth Booth is an opportunity to create conversations among residents who inhabit the same geographic region, and expand our collective understanding of how the city defines what is real, authentic, valuable or true.

Cranbrook Art Museum will host public screenings of selections from the exhibition in a variety of locations in Detroit and Flint. The schedule is as follows:

December 20, 2016, 11am-1pm
Osborn Neighborhood Alliance, Matrix Center
3560 McNichols E, Detroit, MI 48205

January 13, 2016 – April 1, 2017
MW Gallery
815 S. Saginaw Street, Flint, MI 48502
810.835.4900
Gallery hours: Thurs-Fri, 11am-6pm; Sat 11am-5pm

February 16 – March 1, 2017
Arab American National Museum
13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126
313.582.2266
Museum hours: Wed-Sat, 10am-6pm; Sunday 12-5pm

February 22, 2017, 6:30pm
Play House
12657 Moran Street, Detroit, MI 48212

2016 Truth Booth Tour of Metro Detroit and Flint:

Cranbrook Art Museum will host public screenings of selections from the exhibition in a variety of locations in Detroit and Flint. Dates, times and locations will be posted here as soon as they are confirmed.

Organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and Cranbrook Art Museum, this exhibition debuts the Gerald W. McNeely Collection, one of the largest private collections of Pewabic Pottery recently donated to Cranbrook Art Museum and never before seen in its entirety. The Collection includes over 117 works including a Revelation Pottery Vase, which pre-dates the founding of Pewabic, and includes works from throughout the career of Mary Chase Perry Stratton, founder of Pewabic Pottery. The exhibition will also highlight Cranbrook’s own collection of Pewabic Pottery from the Art Museum and campus, which George Gough Booth, founder of Cranbrook, actively collected over his lifetime.

This Walker Art Center-organized exhibition, assembled with the assistance of the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive, examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Loosely organized around Timothy Leary’s famous mantra, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” the exhibition charts the evolution of the period, from pharmacological, technological, and spiritual means to expand consciousness and alter one’s perception of reality, to the foment of a publishing revolution that sought to create new networks of like-minded people and raise popular awareness to some of the era’s greatest social and political struggles, to new ways of refusing mainstream society in favor of ecological awareness, the democratization of tools and technologies, and a more communal survival.

Presenting a broad range of art forms and artifacts of the era, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia features experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive and participatory media environments, alternative publishing and ephemera, and experimental film. Bringing into dramatic relief the limits of Western society’s progress, the exhibition explores one of the most vibrant and inventive periods of the not-too-distant past, one that still resonates within culture today.

Designs of the Times is the third exhibition in the Cranbrook Archives ephemera series. The exhibition, which represents Cranbrook’s diverse audiences by exploring both design and history, illustrates the impact of new technologies and the information age on the poster medium as visual communication. Organized chronologically, the exhibition documents the curatorial, educational, musical, scientific, social, and theatrical events that have enhanced and enriched the Cranbrook community for more than a century. The posters provide a forum for study, not only of historical events but also of the way they are represented through the poster as a social and cultural medium, reflecting the evolution of poster design in response to the changing needs of society.

Empire is the 1964 film by Andy Warhol that consists of eight hours and 24 minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in New York City. The presentation at Cranbrook Art Museum will show in in Wainger Gallery, and relate to Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe. According to Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum Christopher Scoates, Warhol’s Empire shares Reed’s rejection of conventional time. Like Warhol’s film, Reed’s Metal Machine Music relied heavily on sustained or repeated motifs (in this case sound, not images) to produce a work that relied on duration and the concept of time to experience the complete work. Warhol projected the film at a slower rate than it had been filmed, producing a repeated and sustained— almost hypnotic—“visual pitch” or “drone,” much like Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

No Object is an Island: New Dialogues with the Cranbrook Collection is the provocative exhibition that will reopen the expanded and renovated Cranbrook Art Museum at Cranbrook Academy of Art on November 11, 2011. Inside and around the landmark building, designed by renowned Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, the exhibition will pair the work of 50 leading contemporary artists and designers with an equal number of objects from Cranbrook’s outstanding permanent collection of 20th- and 21st-century art and design. Visitors will discover a Nick Cave Soundsuit side-by-side with a tapestry by Arts and Crafts master May Morris. A conceptual partnership that Maarten Baas projects between himself and Marc Newson meets a very real early collaboration of Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. And Whitney Biennalist Tony Mattelli’s hyperrealist sculpture, The Hunter, faces off with one of fellow sculptor Kate Clark’s ravishing taxidermy beasts with a human face.

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