Punk’s Deskilling Spirit Today | PRINT MAG

At the Cranbrook Art Museum’s new exhibition (June 16 – October 7) “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986,” punk rock’s visual lexicon comes into focus. The retrospective exhibit is the largest of its kind and includes displays featuring posters, zines and everything in between from the massive collection of Andrew Krivine, who has assembled a major worldwide hoard of documentary treasures. The curator, Andrew Blauvelt, has done a masterful exhibit and catalog. In the broadsheet newspaper-format catalog for the show Blauvelt writes:Photo by Debra HolmesAs a student and a practitioner of graphic design during the punk era (and a fan of the music), I knew from firsthand experience how the movement left an indelible impression on the field and vice versa. Reflecting on this moment some forty years later, it became much clearer how punk’s transgressive spirit upended the seemingly dogmatic rules of how graphic design should look ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Graphic Design, punk

In The Groove with Shepard Fairey | WDET

By Ryan Patrick HooperImage credit: Courtesy of Shepard FaireyIn the past 30 years, Shepard Fairey has become one of the most popular street artists in the world. From his early creations — like his signature “Obey Giant” designs featuring the likeness of wrestler Andre the Giant (pictured above) — to his 2008 campaign poster for Barack Obama, Fairey has carved a path very much his own in contemporary art. Now there’s a Michigan art museum that’s highlighting his early work with the help of downtown contemporary art gallery Library Street Collective. Ahead of his new exhibition “Salad Days, 1989-1999” at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Fairey spoke with CultureShift’s Ryan Patrick Hooper about the influence music has had on his work over the years for In The Groove — CultureShift’s award-winning series where a wide range of guests look back on three formative songs from three formative years of their life. Track #1: A Young Shepard Discovers the Sex Pistols As a teenager growing up in Charleston, South ...

Tagged: Shepard Fairey

Punk Graphics, Shepard Fairey Exhibits to Debut at Cranbrook Art Museum | HOUR DETROIT

BY EMMA KLUG Galleries will feature DIY-style posters, zines, and album coversPHOTO COURTESY THE GALLERIES AT MOORE, PHILADELPHIA. PHOTO BY JOSEPH HU.Following a series of exhibitions that focused on street art, Cranbrook Art Museum is now attempting to explore the cultural impact of punk and post-punk through its new exhibits Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999. Paying homage to the art forms and artists that helped visually define the movement, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die features appropriated or borrowed images, collage and montage work, as well as DIY zines and flyers. The exhibit will also take a look at how comics, the horror genre, and modern art influenced the creation of punk graphics. “Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression,” says the Cranbrook Art Museum Director, Andrew Blauvelt, who curated the exhibitions. “The energy of ...

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk, Shepard Fairey

Punk rock meets visual art at a pair of shows at Cranbrook | METRO TIMES

By Lee DeVitoAs 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 ...

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

Punk art shouts from the walls of Cranbrook in new show | OAKLAND PRESS

By Joseph Szczesny, For Digital First Media Punk music has made loud waves ever since the 1970s. But the punk sensibility also caught on with visual artists, who used a variety of media to stretch the philosophy of punk beyond music into different corners of popular culture, says Andrew Blauvelt, the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and the curator of the new show making its debut at the museum with a preview party Friday, June 15. It opens to the public Saturday, June 16.Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and curator of the new show “Too Fast to Live. Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey. Salad Days, 1989-1999” debuting at the museum June 15 & 16, 2018. Photo by Joseph Szczesny/Digital First MediaThe exhibition, “Too Fast to Live. Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey. Salad Days, 1989-1999” is actually two shows ...

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

How punk rock changed the course of design history | CO. DESIGN

BY KELSEY CAMPBELL-DOLLAGHANImage: PD Rearick/courtesy Cranbrook MuseumPunk, and its associated subcultures, revolutionized design practice. A slew of new shows and books reckons with its impact. Do you remember the first zine someone put in your hands? If you lived through punk’s heydey, or any of the subcultures that reverberated down from its birth to echo into the mid-aughts, you probably came across more than a few of them. Variable in quality, self-printed, gratuitously niche, and often full of self-referential winks, zine culture existed at a precise moment when computers were becoming more common, but social networks hadn’t yet made the notion of communicating with your peers on paper irrelevant. They mixed DIY culture and nascent technology with music and art. You sent away for them, hoarded them, and published your own responses, even if you were a high schooler imagining a culture thousands of miles–and probably a decade or two–away from your ...

Tagged: Graphic Design, punk

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 opens at Cranbrook Art Museum | DEZEEN

Photo by PD Rearick"If punk birthed a thousand garage bands, it certainly birthed as many designers," says Punk Graphics curator By Gunseli Yalcinkaya The curator of a new exhibition on punk graphics at Detroit's Cranbrook Art Museum, has selected five key works that explore the movement in the United States and United Kingdom. The exhibition titled Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 focuses on the visual development of punk culture between 1976 and 1986. It contains approximately 500 of punk's most memorable graphics – including flyers, posters, albums and zines. "Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression," said curator Andrew Blauvelt. "The energy of the movement created a powerful subcultural phenomena that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art and design," he explained. "Punk provided many new opportunities for designers" The exhibition aims to show punk "as a heterogeneous design ...

Tagged: design, exhibition design, Music

Chris Scoates Announces Departure from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum

  Chris Scoates Announces Departure from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., March 29, 2018 -- Cranbrook Educational Community announced today that Chris Scoates has resigned as Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum. Scoates will stay at the Academy through the end of the academic year, after which time he will begin a new position as Director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. His last day at the Academy will be June 30. “Chris has overseen the Academy during a particularly challenging time for art schools across the country, and has managed to steer the school in a positive direction, while also providing institutional oversight for one of the country’s top contemporary art museums,” said Dominic DiMarco, President of Cranbrook Educational Community. “He has brought forward several creative new initiatives to move the Academy into the future, and for that we are ...

“Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986” and “Shepard Fairey: Salad Days 1989-1999” Open at Cranbrook Art Museum in June

Exhibitions Run from June 16 through October 7, 2018 Opening Celebration: June 15, 2018 Bloomfield Hills, Mich., March 5, 2018—This summer, Cranbrook Art Museum will organize the largest exhibition of its kind exploring the unique visual language of the punk and post-punk movements from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 will feature hundreds of graphics—including many rare flyers, posters, albums, promotions, and zines. “Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression,” says Director of Cranbrook Art Museum Andrew Blauvelt, who is curating the exhibition. “From the dress and hairstyles of its devotees and the on-stage theatrics of its musicians to the graphic design of its numerous forms of printed matter. As such, punk’s energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomena that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art and design.” In conjunction with ...

Cranbrook Art Museum Presents True to Form: Selections from the Permanent Collection

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., Feb. 28, 2018 – Cranbrook Art Museum will open the new exhibition True to Form: Selections from the Permanent Collection on March 10, 2018. Drawing from the Museum's holdings of more than 6,000 objects of art, design, and craft, True to Form celebrates Museum favorites alongside newly-acquired works debuting for the first time. It will open during regular business hours, 11am-5pm. True to Form is thematically arranged into three different sections, each a creative action—Capture, Distill, and Disrupt. Collectively, True to Form is a meditation on how art is in a constant state of reaction, revision, and expansion, and how a museum collection is a reflection of this continuous evolution. Capture includes work by artists creating “stilled lives” in photography, painting, and the plastic arts, resulting in surprises that contradict expectations of each medium. For example, Andy Warhol’s Polaroids of posed art world glitterati is contrasted with Duane Hanson’s ...