Shaping the Field: Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art

Ceramics has been foundational to Cranbrook Academy of Art since its inception. In 1928, founder George Gough Booth established arts and crafts workshops that included ceramics. In 1938, Finnish-born artist Maija Grotell was appointed as head of the department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which would prove a serendipitous move. Though Academy President Eliel Saarinen insisted on an equivalence between the categories of craft, fine arts, and architecture, Grotell furthered this notion, helping to shape the department into the materially-rooted, experimental program that it is today.  

During her tenure, Grotell changed the name of the department from pottery to ceramics, encouraging deeper explorations of the materiality of the medium. This semantic shift also opened the field to reconsider techniques, notions of functionality, and the role of artistic expression, pushing ceramic objects towards sculptural scale.  

Shaping the Field: Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art draws on Cranbrook Art Museum’s collection of work by Cranbrook artists, visualizing various dialogues in ceramics from expanded functional forms to sculptural ceramics that have shaped contemporary understandings of the medium. Artists on view include Maija Grotell, Toshiko Takaezu, Richard DeVore, Marie Woo, and Ebitenyefa Baralaye, among others.