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 ...

Cranbrook’s ‘Hippie Modernism’ is up for two more weeks, and you have to go | Detroit Metro Times

Cranbrook Art Museum's delightful mounting of the Walker's exhibition "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia" is up until October 9. You absolutely have to go. If you have even the most passing interest in the more radical leanings of the 1960s counterculture, visit! At least once. I spent a few hours there the other week, and was blown away by its scope. I can't wait to return. It looks like a great time to visit will be the show's final day, on Sunday, Oct. 9, for a three hour symposium called 'Free Radicals' which examines the show's themes. A bit of the wall text is a little reductive and even silly (as is the way that the show is divided into three sections based on Timothy Leary's infamous maxim). But, so what! The sheer volume of work here on and by fringe architectural co-ops like Archigram and Super Superstudio, or the ...

When Art and Design Got High on Hippie Utopianism | Hyperallergic

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Sometimes, taking a wider view of art history can create a more expansive curatorial vision. Previously the senior curator of Design, Research, and Publishing, and later the curator of Architecture and Design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Andrew Blauvelt developed a wider take on which elements of cultural production contribute to art movements. He brought this perspective to Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, an exhibition that was five years in-the-making before it expanded into the Walker’s 14,000 square-foot floor plan in 2015. Hippie Modernism (with the exception of a few artworks) is now at the Cranbrook Art Museum, following on Blauvelt’s heels in his new appointment as the director of the museum. The exhibition offers a fascinating look at the merging of hippie values with a modern design sensibility and how it sparked unique cultural production far outside the highly commoditized art market ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt

Cranbrook Museum unveils Edward Gorey artworks | Oakland Press

As the director of library and academic resources for the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Judy Dyki’s duties include surveying gifts potential donors offer the library. One such recent gift from an alumnus, who graduated from Cranbrook back in the 1960s and asked not to be identified, ultimately led to a new exhibit opening in the Cranbrook Art Museum’s Lower Gallery today (Sunday, Sept. 18). It features work from Edward Gorey, an artist who had a major influence on American popular culture in the five decades before his death in 2000. “The collector used to live near the Gotham Book Store in New York, that was into promoting Gorey’s career,” Dyki says. For years, the alumnus, who now lives in Bloomfield Hills, carefully assembled a collection of the books Gorey published in small quantities in New York. “He had a lot of first editions,” she says. “(The donor) bought in part so he could ...

Tagged: Cranbrook Academy of Art Library, Judy Dyki

Nick Cave “Here Hear” Featured on PBS’s Art21

On Friday, September 16 the new ART21 special featuring Cranbrook Art Museum's Nick Cave: Here Hear project debuted. Check your local PBS listings or watch online here.

“Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey” Opening at Cranbrook Art Museum

Exhibition features artwork and publications from prolific author and illustrator   Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Aug. 30, 2016 — On September 18, Cranbrook Art Museum will open its latest exhibition, Unsettled: The Work of Edward Gorey, on view in the Museum’s deSalle Gallery through March 12, 2017. The exhibition is a collaboration between Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Academy of Art Library. Gorey is known for his masterful pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate his captivating books, conjuring a vaguely Edwardian world of handcars, boater hats, and Dickensian children. The exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum will feature many of Gorey’s classic texts as well as his experiments with the physical structure of the book—split-pages, doubled-books, accordion formats, postcard sets, and miniature books. Also on view are many of Gorey’s illustrations for other authors, such as Samuel Beckett, Edward Lear, John Updike, T.S. Eliot, and H.G. Wells. In addition, Gorey’s work entered the living rooms of millions through ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Edward Gorey, Judi Dyki

‘The Truth Booth’ gathers voices and perspectives from across metro Detroit | KnightBlog

Since July 31, the Detroit metro area has been visited by “The Truth Booth,” an ongoing interactive project conceived by Cause Collective, and brought for a two-week intensive visit to Michigan by a $60,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant awarded to the Cranbrook Art Museum. Laura Mott, curator of contemporary art and design at Cranbrook, worked previously with artist Hank Willis Thomas and Cause Collective’s Ryan Alexiev to help get the project on its feet, nearly eight years ago. “We had done a show with Ryan at Mission 17, where I was working,” Mott said. “I met Hank [Willis Thomas] through that. And they were working together already in Cause Collective–‘The Truth Booth’ was an idea they had that was sort of on paper, and I wrote a grant to get funding to build it. And then I moved to Sweden! So I essentially sourced them some seed money to build the ...

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