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.

Download the Press Release PDF

Cranbrook Academy of Art is delighted to present its annual exhibition of work by the 2012 class of Masters of Fine Arts and Masters of Architecture students in the newly renovated galleries of Cranbrook Art Museum. The Academy’s program is interdisciplinary in orientation, representing the crossing and merging of mediums as well as the investigation and use of content from diverse areas of thought. The exhibition of these 79 emerging artists reflects the culmination of their time spent at the Academy and ranges from painting and sculpture to video, photography and installation.

George Nelson is considered one of the most influential figures in American design during the second half of the twentieth century. Operating from the western side of Michigan as Design Director at the Zeeland-based furniture manufacturer Herman Miller for more than twenty years, Nelson had his sights firmly focused on Cranbrook, which was also playing a defining role in the development of Modernism.

Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, George Nelson: Architect/ Writer/ Designer Teacher is the first comprehensive retrospective of Nelson’s work. It has been touring in Europe and most recently in the United States at the Bellevue Art Museum in Seattle. Cranbrook is the final stop in the US tour and the last opportunity to see this major exhibition before the work returns to Germany.

More than 120 three-dimensional objects including examples of chairs, benches, desks, cabinets, lamps, and clocks, as well as over 50 historical documents, such as drawings, photographs, architectural models, and films, form the core of the exhibition. Nelson was responsible for the production of numerous furnishings and interior designs that became modern classics, including the Coconut Chair (1956), the Marshmallow Sofa (1956), the Ball Clock (1947), the Bubble Lamps (1952 onwards).

“Vision and Interpretation: Building Cranbrook, 1904-2012” presents the architectural legacy of Cranbrook as an artistic narrative emerging from the visionary ideas of George Gough Booth. During the early 1900s, Booth’s vision was realized through collaborations with renowned architects and craftsmen, including Albert Kahn and Eliel Saarinen. More recently, the campus has been interpreted by contemporary designers offering contrasting and complementary projects on the National Historic Landmark site. “Vision and Interpretation” is a collaboration between Cranbrook Art Museum and Cranbrook Archives.