Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate Degree Exhibition Opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on April 23

Exhibition Preview on April 22 OPEN(STUDIOS) Returns on April 30 BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., March 21, 2017 --The 2017 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art opens to the public on April 23 and will showcase work from more than 60 graduating Cranbrook Academy of Art students. Featuring pieces that are the culmination of two years of studio work from a diverse group of students, visitors will see firsthand what it takes to become tomorrow’s creative leaders. The exhibition will run from April 23 through May 14, 2017, at Cranbrook Art Museum. A special ArtMembers Opening Reception will be held on April 22 from 6-9pm. Memberships may be purchased in advance via our website or at the door that evening. The exhibition will fill the entire Upper Galleries of Cranbrook Art Museum. It is the most diverse exhibition offered all year as it showcases work from the Academy’s 10 departments – 2D and 3D ...

Finland 100: The Cranbrook Connection Opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on March 21

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., March 15, 2017 – Cranbrook Art Museum is pleased to announce the upcoming opening of our new exhibition, Finland 100: The Cranbrook Connection, which recognizes Finland’s centennial of independence and examines the profound influence this country has had on the development of the arts in America. The exhibition opens March 21 and runs through January 14, 2018. According to Andrew Blauvelt, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum, design has always been a special strength of Finnish culture, exemplified by the Cranbrook campus itself. When designing Cranbrook, architect Eliel Saarinen blended the national romantic style he helped forge in his native Finland, with the Art Nouveau and Art Deco influences prominent in America at the time. Saarinen’s comprehensive philosophy that one should design in the context of the next larger thing—from the chair to the room to the house to the city—meant that no element of the built environment should ...

“The Truth Is I Hear You” Debuts Public Screening at the Arab American National Museum on February 16

Additional film screenings in Detroit and Flint BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., Feb. 15, 2017 -- This summer, The Truth Booth set out on a tour of 11 locations in metro Detroit and Flint, giving more than 1,000 residents the opportunity to record a statement starting with the words, “The Truth Is…” The result is a 48-minute film showcasing local residents’ private hopes, desires and concerns. This film is currently on display at Cranbrook Art Museum, but this week, will also be shown in some of the neighborhoods where the testimonials were recorded. On Thursday, February 16, it will debut at the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan, where it will air continually during museum hours from February 16 through March 1. Cranbrook Art Museum will also host a special one-day screening at Play House in Detroit on February 22. Residents of the nearby Banglatown neighborhoods are featured in the film, and there will also ...

Cranbrook Art Museum Exhibits Period Rooms | The Detroit News

“Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth Century Period Rooms” is a small but utterly charming show of four interiors that all channel the zeitgeist of their respective eras. Drawn from Cranbrook’s vast reserves of furniture and artifacts, these little stage sets variously represent the early Arts and Crafts aesthetic that emerged in England during the late Victorian Period, the 1960s bachelor pad, a 1970s experiment in cave dwelling and a post-modern fun house circa 1980. The show was curated by museum director Andrew Blauvelt and Laura Mott, curator of contemporary art and design. Of the four spaces, “The Bachelor Pad” is easily the most fun with its styling from TV’s “Mad Men.” It’s heavy on modernist furniture by George Nelson, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, and rich in accessories ripped from the pages of a Playboy magazine guide to stylish and irreproachable masculinity: ashtrays, tumblers, cocktail shakers and other symbols of virility. Death and virility seemed to ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Ingrid LaFleur, Laura Mott, Urban Jupena

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