Hippie Modernism featured on Detours Podcast | Detroit Free Press

Interview with "Hippie Modernism" curator and Cranbrook Art Museum Director Andrew Blauvelt begins at 34:33. "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia" is an exhibit opening Saturday at Cranbrook Art Museum. It looks into the unexpected ways that seemingly disparate movements of the '60s and '70s influenced one another in art, architecture and design. The museum's director, Adam Blauvelt, curated the exhibit and talks about what to expect. Hosted weekly by arts journalist Rob St. Mary, with an assist from Free Press arts & entertainment editor Steve Byrne, “Detours” offers new episodes each Thursday.

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

John Glick: A Legacy in Clay Opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 18

First Comprehensive Exhibition of Studio Potter’s Work BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., May 2, 2016 – Cranbrook Art Museum is pleased to announce the upcoming opening of our new exhibition, John Glick: A Legacy in Clay, which will highlight the illustrious career of the ceramist and 1962 graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art. The exhibition will open on June 18 and run through March 12, 2017. This is the first major exhibition to survey the immense range of ceramic vessels, tableware, and sculpture that has made Glick one of today’s premiere figures in American studio pottery. Glick operated his Plum Tree Pottery studio in Farmington Hills, Michigan, for 50 years. During this time, he remained committed to the art and craft of functional vessels and their incorporation into the rituals of daily life. Glick has recently retired and prepares to close his studio in anticipation of a move to California. John Glick: A Legacy in ...

Tagged: Ceramics, John Glick, Shelley Selim

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia Opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 18

Clark Richert, Richard Kallwelt, Gene Bernofsky, and JoAnn Bernofsky Drop City c.1966. Photo by Clark Richert.Celebrated Exhibition Curated by New Museum Director Andrew Blauvelt BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., April 27, 2016 – The acclaimed exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia travels to Cranbrook Art Museum this June, bringing an examination of the intersections of art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition comes to Cranbrook from the Walker Art Center, where it enjoyed a successful run from October 24, 2015 through February 28, 2016. It was curated by Andrew Blauvelt, former Senior Curator of Research, Design and Publishing at the Walker who left that position to become Director of Cranbrook Art Museum in August of 2015. Cranbrook is the second of only three stops on the show’s national tour. The exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum will run from June 18 through October 9, 2016. A special “preview ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt

Graduating MFA’s show their stuff at Cranbrook | The Detroit News

You expect the annual Graduate Degree Exhibition at the Cranbrook Academy of Art to be wild, and this year’s projects by the newly minted MFA’s do not disappoint. The show, which will be up at the Cranbrook Art Museum through May 15, spotlights the work of 83 students in 10 different artistic disciplines, from metalsmithing to architecture to 3-D, and fills almost every inch of the Eliel Saarinen-designed museum. In a switch, this year the Architecture Department has erected the students’ installations out of doors in a series of seven interactive displays. Inside, both upstairs and downstairs are filled with artworks that consumed the graduates’ last semester, many of them huge, and almost all marvelously weird and strange. (Downstairs there’s also a small, elegant Pewabic Pottery show that shouldn’t be missed.) Consider Juvana Soliven’s “Relational Failures,” three beeswax sculptures that, while highly abstract, all do seem to point to retreat and disappointment. Soliven, who’s from ...

Tagged: Emmy Bright, Johanna Herr, The Detroit News

Cranbrook Grad Degree Exhibition spotlights student works | The Oakland Press

Every April, Cranbrook Academy of Art puts on an exhibit highlighting graduate students’ work throughout their college career. With the 83-student graduating class, this year’s works are displayed both inside and outside for one of the biggest exhibits yet. “It’s a very great experience because you get to see the innovation that is the forefront of art, architecture and design,” says Laura Mott, exhibition curator. “Cranbrook has an important legacy in that, and this is the next generation.” The works are spread along 15,000 square feet inside the museum, in addition to seven interactive installations across the museum grounds, arranged in a complimentary way, which Mott says was like putting together a puzzle. The outdoor installations are new to the exhibit tradition. Works are showcased from the school’s 10 departments: 2D and 3D Design, Architecture, Ceramics, Fiber, Metalsmithing, Painting, Photography, Print Media and Sculpture. Following the ArtMembers’ Opening Reception, from 6-8 p.m. Saturday, April 16, ...

Tagged: Katherine Gaydos, Kelsey Elder

Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate Degree Exhibition to Open at Cranbrook Art Museum on April 17

Time is Running Out to Catch the Lou Reed Installation at Cranbrook | Detroit Metro Times

Was it one of the iconoclastic rock 'n' roll innovator's greatest works, or was it his most flawed statement this side of Lulu? Was the double album a carefully crafted work that expanded on experiments made by the founders of minimalism a decade earlier, or was it a hastily conceived barrage of senseless noise? Did he really expect this caterwauling double album of loud feedback soup to be released on RCA's classical label Red Seal, or did he simply turn it in as a way of flipping off The Man ­— fully intending for this mess to upset his label enough that they'd break his contract with them? The answer to each of those questions is most likely somewhere in the middle. We do know for certain that Lou Reed's 1975 double album Metal Machine Music (RCA) was reviled by rock critics upon its release, and that most copies were returned, ...

Tagged: Chris Scoates, Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music

The Deep-Rooted Expression of Ceramics | Hyperallergic

DETROIT — One does not, perhaps, consider ceramic objects to be immediately gendered, possess sexuality, or be particularly political. But pottery is one of the oldest practices among humans, and is so rooted in fundamental domestic and utilitarian concerns that there is literally no known human society that has not made vessels of some kind. This was something curator Anders Ruhwald, who has served as artist-in-residence and head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art since 2008, held very firmly in mind as he assembled contributors for This is the Living Vessel: person. This is what matters. This is our universe., a group show at Pewabic Pottery — an active pottery studio, showroom, and gallery space, as well as one of Detroit’s oldest businesses — which presents seven artists who express perspectives outside the white/male/heteronormative art world structure, using ceramics as a medium. The show borrows its title ...

In a Sprawling Collaboration, an Artist and Her Subject Craft His Identity | Hyperallergic

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — We live in a time that challenges easy distinctions on the subject of identity. Gender has become fluid as never before in Western society, and art-makers find themselves remarkably unconfined by medium in an era that values ideas articulated by the most effective means possible rather than with a more traditionally rigid separation between disciplines. This freedom to maneuver is fully evident in Him, a project Liz Cohen developed over the past year as artist-in-residence and head of the photography department at Cranbrook Academy of Art (a position she has held since 2008). Cohen worked intensively with her subject, Eric Crosley, a male-presenting, self-described eunuch who has engaged in radical physical transformations in his search for a body that he feels appropriately reflects his identity — a topic he captures movingly in his own poetry. Cohen, who considers herself a documentary artist, uses her photographic eye to ...

Tagged: Liz Cohen

Simple Forms, Stunning Glazes featured in KnightBlog

If the title to the ceramics show guest curated by Anders Ruhwald for the main gallery at Pewabic in Detroit sounds a little on the hippie side, that’s because it’s a snippet of text lifted from the introduction to “Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and Person” by M.C. Richards—a potter, poet and essayist who taught at the Black Mountain College in the 1940s. Ruhwald’s show, “This Is the Living Vessel: Person. This Is What Matters. This Is Our Universe,” seeks to show work that embodies some of the concepts outlined by Richards in this text, ideas about the latent capacity for creativity in all humans, and our common experience as unlocked by certain art forms. The show presents an impactful collection of works by seven different ceramic artists living and working in America (with the exception of Howard Kottler, a posthumous contributor to the show). Each of these artists leverages the ceramic ...

Tagged: Anders Ruhwald, Ceramics, Pewabic Pottery