Honest To Goodness: One Thousand “Truths” from Detroit & Flint on Display at Cranbrook Art Museum | WDET CultureShift

The Truth Booth is a traveling, story-snagging sculpture created by artist Hank Willis Thomas and the Cause Collective. It was designed to capture unfiltered opinions of folks throughout the world, including Ireland and Afghanistan. The exterior of the aforementioned booth is shaped like a giant cartoon speech bubble with the word ‘TRUTH’ boldly printed on one side. The interior acts much like a photo booth, the kind you might encounter at a wedding, but it serves as a studio to record video responses from the public. Confessions, almost. Each video starts with the participant saying “The truth is …” and expounding from there. This summer, The Truth Booth spent a couple weeks traveling to eleven neighborhoods in Detroit and Flint to record about one-thousand residents from Detroit and Flint residents. Now, these “truths” are on display as a 60-foot-wide video installation in the Cranbrook Art Museum. While in Michigan, The Truth Booth ...

The Truth Is… | Culture Source

Maybe you saw it, an inflatable cartoon speech bubble with the word “TRUTH” emblazoned on it that popped up in neighborhoods throughout Michigan this past summer? What did it mean? As no two “truths” are the same, The Truth Booth meant different things to different people. “Some people saw it as a soapbox, some people saw it as a confessional, some people saw it as a way to engage,” recalls Laura Mott, curator of contemporary art at Cranbrook Art Museum of visitors interacting with the Booth at 11 stops throughout Metro Detroit and Flint. “We never told people what to say, we just said: ‘We invite you into the booth.’” The product of these interactions is now on view at Cranbrook in The Truth Is I Hear You: A Project By the Cause Collective, running through March 19th. At the exhibition’s core is a 43-minute video, pulling from the more than 1,000 ...

Tagged: Detroit, MI, Laura Mott, MI, The Cause Collective

Cranbrook Academy grad’s fiberwork inspired by African tradition | Oakland Press

Sonya Clark was always drawn to art, but early on, her career took a few twists and turns. Growing up in the Washington, D.C., area, Clark went to Sidwell Friends School — the same school President Barack Obama’s daughters attend. “I was an artist from the start, but happened to go to a prep school, and art was one of those things you did to be well-rounded,” she says. So, after high school, Clark went to Amherst College in Massachusetts, first in math and then psychology. At Amherst, it became apparent her true passion was in textile arts. “I studied with Rowland Abiodun, an African art history professor, and I became interested in what is now called material culture and the idea of thinking about culture and cultural stories as found in objects and material,” she says. “My graduation gift from Amherst College from my parents was to go to West Africa, and I studied textile ...

Michigan residents share their ‘Truth’ in Cranbrook exhibition | Oakland Press

For Will Sylvester, everyone has a peculiar truth they want to express, but sometimes they need a nudge or a push to let it come out into the open. Resident of metropolitan Detroit and Flint will offer up their own private versions of the “Truth” in a new exhibit opening Nov. 19 at the Cranbrook Art Museum. The new exhibit, “The Truth is I Hear You,” is the most ambitious of three new shows opening at the museum prior to Thanksgiving. Sylvester, one of the artists, brought the Truth project to life. He collected testimonials from more than 1,000 people at 11 sites scattered around Southeast Michigan — ranging from the elegant Cranbrook Campus in Bloomfield Hills to the Arab-American Museum in Dearborn, the Detroit Riverfront and downtown Flint — to speak up and speak out. “The original idea is this thought that everybody has a truth. As artists, we have our individual truths,” ...

Tagged: Corine vermeulen, Laura Mott, Will Sylvester

Detroit and Flint truth-tellers featured in Cranbrook art exhibit | Detroit Free Press

Last summer more than 1,000 Detroit and Flint residents told the truth in a giant bubble known as the Truth Booth. Some of their testimonies will be on view in "The Truth Is I Hear You," an exhibition opening at Cranbrook Art Museum this weekend and running through March. The Truth Booth, a public art project, toured to 11 sites across metro Detroit and the Flint area over two weeks in the summer. A cross-section of residents showed up to respond to an open-ended challenge: sharing their version of the truth. Their testimonies — two minutes or less — were recorded inside the billowy white thought bubble, which has traveled as widely as Ireland and Afghanistan. On a lazy August summer Sunday, visitors stood in line for the Truth Booth at the Sidewalk Festival for Performing Arts on Detroit’s west side. Later that week, tourists and teens at the Heidelberg Project huddled ...

Review: Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey | Pulp

Edward Gorey: lover of cats, ballet, Victorian/Edwardian era aesthetics, fur coats, pen-and-ink drawings, the color black and bats. Becoming a fan of Gorey has come in/out of fashion many times over the years, but since his death in 2000 he has only grown in the public conscientiousness. If you don’t know Edward Gorey’s work you surely know of the legions of other artists who were inspired by his work. From Tim Burton to Lemony Snicket, and goth culture to steampunk Gorey’s influence is felt far and wide. And from Neil Gaiman to Emily the Strange, and Lenore all things, dark, atmospheric and vaguely historical likely started with a love of Edward Gorey. Gorey’s black and white aesthetic lends itself to tattoo work, and often seeing a Gorey inspired tattoo will be for some their first glimpse into his macabre and hypnotizing world view. Many people also discover Gorey from the ...

Tagged: Judy Dyki

Cranbrook puts smart, spooky spin on Halloween | C & G Newspapers

BLOOMFIELD HILLS — At Cranbrook, Halloween isn’t just a day on the calendar or an excuse to indulge in a few pieces of candy — it’s an all-out extravaganza. From the science institute to the art museum, this weekend will be packed with family-friendly activities to celebrate all things spooky, with an educational twist. Things get started at Cranbrook Institute of Science as guests are welcomed back for the annual Halloween Science event. With three sessions this year, families are invited to haunt the decorated museum and enjoy scary hands-on activities and demonstrations. Costumes are strongly encouraged, according to Stephen Pagnani, head of communications at Cranbrook Institute of Science. “Halloween Science is one of the institute’s most popular annual events and a good way to explore the science behind the scary — and not so scary,” Pagnani said in an email. “From the scary to the ick, from pumpkin chucking using our trebuchet ...

Cranbrook Art Museum Presents Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms and From the Vault: Recent Gifts to the Collection

Exhibitions open in November alongside The Truth Is I Hear You Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Oct. 18, 2016— Cranbrook Art Museum announces two new exhibitions opening alongside The Truth Is I Hear You on November 19 that will showcase unique objects from the Museum’s extensive collections. The first is Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms, the third installment in a curatorial series that rethinks historic methods of displaying artworks in a museum. This exhibition uses the period room, a domestic space built inside the museum, to simulate the original habitat or context of an artwork or historical object. It will remain open through March 19, 2017. The exhibition draws from both the art and science collections of Cranbrook and beyond to reimagine four distinct periods significant to Cranbrook’s own history and the evolution of the 20th-century domestic landscape: The Naturalist’s Athenaeum Devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement that inspired Cranbrook’s founders, George and Ellen Scripps ...

All Shall Be Revealed | HOUR Detroit

Cranbrook Art Museum to host exhibition based on metro Detroit and Flint-area residents’ visits to The Truth Booth Most of us were probably told as children that honesty is the best policy. But entry into the adult world often carries with it a more nuanced View. To hear the participants of the In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) project tell it, having an opportunity to speak one’s truth is actually a rare event. The Truth Booth — a portable, inflatable, and interactive sculpture created by Cause Collective artists Ryan Alexiev, Jim Ricks, Will Sylvester, and Hank Willis Thomas — began its international tour in Ireland in 2011. It stopped in Michigan for two weeks in July and August during a tour that included both political party conventions and all 50 states. Now, results of the Michigan visit will be presented in an exhibit called The Truth Is I Hear ...

Tagged: Cause Collective, Detroit, MI, Flint, Laura Mott

Cranbrook Art Museum Presents “The Truth Is I Hear You”

Landmark exhibition displays recorded “truths” from Detroit and Flint Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Oct. 5, 2016— On November 18, Cranbrook Art Museum will debut its fall series of exhibitions, including the highly-anticipated The Truth Is I Hear You, a region-wide collaboration with artist group The Cause Collective. The Cause Collective consists of Ryan Alexiev, Jim Ricks, Will Sylvester and Hank Willis Thomas, a team of artists, designers and ethnographers who brought their Truth Booth to eleven locations in Detroit and Flint this summer. The booth is a portable recording studio in the shape of a giant speech bubble which set out to capture what the residents of each location define as real, authentic, valuable and true. Participants had up to two minutes to record a statement starting with the words, “The Truth Is…” The filmed results, numbering more than one thousand, have been used to create an ambitious 60-foot-wide video installation that will be on ...