Wild Vinyl: Designer Art Toys segment on Detroit news station | WXYZ-TV

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH (WXYZ) — Wild Vinyl: Designer Art Toys is now on display at the Cranbrook Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The exhibit, which will remain on display throught June 2, 2019, showcases a variety of designer toys from individual sculptural figures to outlandish monsters, and will focus on limited edition artist creations and serial productions. Like prints and other forms of art produced in multiples, seriality and variation on a theme dominate the art toy genre.

Saarinen House in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., is a total work of art | Star Tribune

JAMES HAEFNER • CRANBROOK CENTER FOR COLLECTIONS AND RESEARCHThe 1930 Saarinen House in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., mixes Arts and Crafts and art deco, with Finnish touches.I thought it would be easy, on a Friday afternoon in August, to hop on a tour of Saarinen House, the eclectic 1930 masterwork by Finnish-American architect Eliel Saarinen on the grounds of Cranbrook, an educational community in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Wrong. When my son and I arrived, the Friday and Saturday tours were sold out. Others had wisely booked tickets to see the celebrated house that mixes elements from two design movements, Arts and Crafts and art deco, with dabs of midcentury modern and Finnish touches. Once a hidden gem serving as Saarinen’s private home and studio from 1930 to 1950 — and not open to the public until decades later, after a major restoration — Saarinen House is a hot ticket. But ...

Cranbrook Art Museum Fall Exhibitions Examine Alumni and Artists-in-Residence of Cranbrook Academy of Art

Exhibitions opening November 17 include: Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped Binion/Saarinen: A McArthur Binion Project Danielle Dean: A Portrait of True RedAnnabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped (installation view), 2017. Photo by Gary Zvonkovic. Courtesy of the artist and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.Bloomfield Hills, Mich., August 16, 2018— This November, Cranbrook Art Museum will open three exhibitions that showcase the incredible range of alumni and Artists-in-Residence that have emerged from Cranbrook Academy of Art and the significant impact they have made in the art world. Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped; Binion/Saarinen: A McArthur Binion Project; and Danielle Dean: A Portrait of True Red will all open at Cranbrook Art Museum on November 17. The Annabeth Rosen and McArthur Binion exhibitions will run through March 10, 2019, and the Danielle Dean exhibition will close on January 6, 2019 to be followed by an upcoming exhibition by Cranbrook Academy of Art Ceramics Artist-in-Residence, ...

Rock band Death returns to Detroit for performance, film screening, Q&A this weekend | METROTIMES

Courtesy PhotoPioneering punk band Death is returning to Detroit to perform at this weekend's inaugural Motor City Muscle festival — joining an already-stacked lineup that proves when it comes to rock 'n' roll, Detroit is way ahead of the curve. But the free rock music festival isn't the only time fans can catch the band this weekend. The surviving Hackney brothers will be on hand for a Q&A following a screening of the 2012 documentary that helped them get the acclaim they long deserved, A Band Called Death. The screening will start at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 18 at Cranbrook Art Museum's deSalle Auditorium. Admission is included with the $10 general admission gallery fee, which includes the punk rock-themed exhibition Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986. Since it's the Woodward Dream Cruise, organizers advise accessing Cranbrook from the Lone Pine Road entrance. After the screening, you can catch Death performing ...

Tagged: 2018, punk

How Punk Influenced Shepard Fairey – Formative Years of Obey Giant in Michigan | WIDEWALLS

An American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene, Shepard Fairey has inspired generations of artists with his through provoking and often controversial pieces. An icon of the contemporary art scene in the country and beyond, he is best known for his Obey series, a street art project and an experiment in phenomenology, his ubiquitous Hope image created originally as a grassroots activism tool to support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the pervasive We the People poster series for the 2017 Women’s March and beyond. The first ten years of the artist’s practice are explored in the current exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Titled Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999, the show goes back to the roots of his graphic language and philosophies of the punk scene.The Influence of Punk Ethos Highly talented and dedicated, Shepard Fairey has been a consistent presence in national and international art scenes since the 1990s. In his early practice, punk ethos had a decisive role. “When I discovered punk ...

Tagged: graffiti, Shepard Fairey, street art

Cranbrook Art Museum unveils two new exhibits | THE OAKLAND PRESS, MACOMB DAILY, DAILY TRIBUNE

Image credit: Courtesy of Shepard FaireyThe Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills launches its two summer exhibitions — Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey: Salad Days 1989-1999 — on Friday, June 16, slated to run through Oct. 7. Fairey will be in town to speak on Saturday, June 16, and other special events are planned throughout the summer in conjunction with the punk exhibit.

Tagged: 2018, Shepard Fairey

Anarchy at the museum: Punk rock meets visual art at a pair of shows at Cranbrook | METROTIMES

As Cranbrook Art Museum director Andrew Blauvelt points out, the Latin root of the word "amatuer" is "love" — and that's the spirit behind two upcoming shows at the museum, which delve into the visual world of punk rock ethos. "If you're a graphic designer or nerd like I am, you'll understand punk, because it was based on amateurism, which I'm saying in a positive way," he says. That passion — raw, unbridled — is on full display at the museum. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 takes an early look at how the nascent musical genre presented itself, through record sleeves, fliers, posters, clothing, and more. Blauvelt points out that what we now call "culture jamming," or manipulating corporate art, was popularized by Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid, who in turn was inspired by the Situationists in Europe. "It comes out during this time that they are making ...

Tagged: 2018, Graphic Design, punk

Cranbrook’s Shepard Fairey exhibit offers a portrait of the artist as a young rebel | DETROIT FREE PRESS

There’s no doubt the do-it-yourself mentality of punk rock runs through the DNA of Shepard Fairey’s work. With his retrospective exhibition “Salad Days, 1989-1999,” which arrives this weekend at the Cranbrook Art Museum, the iconic contemporary artist looks back on how the anti-authoritarian attitudes associated with skateboarding and the punk rock that provided the sport's soundtrack influenced his work. The DIY approach is evident throughout the exhibition, which was produced with the assistance of Detroit contemporary art gallery Library Street Collective and spotlights the punk aesthetics, philosophies and low-tech production methods used in the first decade of Fairey’s 30-year career. The Cranbrook show is far from the first local showing of Fairey’s work. He exhibited in Detroit in 2000 at the now-defunct contemporary art gallery C-Pop, and in 2015, Library Street Collective showed his work at its downtown gallery. The new show is "not only framed pieces,” says Fairey, who is spending the week before the opening in metro ...

Tagged: 2018, Shepard Fairey

Cranbrook’s ‘Too Fast to Live’ exhibit celebrates the art of punk rock | DETROIT FREE PRESS

From album covers to concert posters, each genre of music comes equipped with its own visual language that often feels like an extension of the music itself. At the Cranbrook Art Museum’s new exhibition “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986,”  punk rock’s visual lexicon gets its due. The exhibit is considered to be the largest of its kind and includes displays featuring posters, zines and everything in between. While “Too Fast to Live” isn’t an exhibit based on musical history, it does manage to present a roughly chronological and visual timeline tracing the evolution of the punk and new wave music genres overseas and in the U.S. via New York City. During this era, New York served as ground zero for a critical mass of counterculture musicians and artists who were forging an aesthetic that continues to be an influential force in contemporary design.The exhibit starts in 1976 when artwork was ...

Tagged: 2018

All the cool art and artists we saw at the Shepard Fairey/Punk preview party (photo gallery) | METROTIMES

Niagara from Destroy All MonstersThis summer Cranbrook Art Museum dives head-first into the depths of punk and post-punk culture with the debut of Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999. The museum kicked off the event on Friday night. Check out all our shots of the fun. June 15, 2018 Photos by Mike Pfeiffer

Tagged: 2018