Cranbrook exhibit gets noisy with Lou Reed album | Detroit Free Press

Back in 1975, rock musician Lou Reed nearly drove his now revered career into the ground with the release of his fifth solo album, "Metal Machine Music." As one of pop culture’s earliest examples of experimental noise (meaning no songs and no structure), the controversial "Metal Machine Music" was largely hailed as a joke upon its release by fans and critics alike. It took decades before it was given proper credit for helping spearhead the idea of contemporary sound art. To help pay tribute to the widely misunderstood double album — a current staple of avant-garde music — Cranbrook Art Museum is hosting an exhibit called “Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe” through March 26. Housed in just a small black room, the exhibit is made up of a live ambisonic 3D installation that utilizes 12 loudspeakers to create a fully immersive sound experience. It’s designed ...

Tagged: Lou Reed

Cranbrook Receives Knight Arts Challenge Awards

Photo Credit: The Roadside Tavern, Lisdoon, Ireland.Image courtesy of Cause CollectiveCranbrook Art Museum and Cranbrook Artist-in-Residence Anders Ruhwald Each Awarded Knight Arts Challenge Grants Projects will both originate in the city of Detroit Bloomfield Hills, Mich., November 10, 2015 --  Cranbrook Art Museum and Anders Ruhwald, Cranbrook Academy of Art Artist-in-Residence, were each awarded separate grants yesterday from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Detroit Knight Arts Challenge. Cranbrook Art Museum was awarded a $60,000 matching grant to create a Detroit tour of the public art installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth). The ambitious public program will also result in a new presentation at the Museum in the fall of 2016. The Truth Booth is a portable, inflatable video recording studio in the shape of a giant speech bubble. Created by artists Hank Willis Thomas, Ryan Alexiev, Will Sylvester and Jim Ricks, known together as the Cause ...

Tagged: Anders Ruhwald, Exhibition, Knight Arts, The Truth Booth

Cranbrook Art Museum Announces New Exhibition Series

Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Oct. 12, 2015- Cranbrook Art Museum announces its fall season of exhibitions today, which continue the Museum’s tradition of bringing innovative and interactive contemporary art to the metro Detroit area. Opening on November 21 (with a special ArtMembers’ Opening Reception on November 20) are the exhibitions Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe; Andy Warhol: Empire; Him, a project by Liz Cohen; and The Cranbrook Salon. Then in December, the Museum will debut Simple Forms, Stunning Glazes: The Gerald W. McNeely Pewabic Pottery Collection. While the new exhibitions are being installed, the lower galleries of the Museum remain open, featuring the exhibitions Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia and Read Image: See Text. After an incredibly successful run, the Nick Cave: Here Hear exhibition closed yesterday.Photo by Amy-Beth McNeelyLou Reed, Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe November 21, 2015 – March 26, ...

Tagged: Lou Reed

Wearable Artwork Makes Noise Against Racism | Studio 360

This is not a story about Nick Cave the Australian rock star. This is a story about a different Nick Cave: a Missouri-born fabric artist, sculptor, and dancer. Cave has become famous in the art world for what he calls “soundsuits,” wearable sculptures composed of bottle caps, sweaters, toy drums, globes, metal buckets, tambourines, purses, and anything else Cave finds rummaging through flea markets. Inspired by the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991, Cave’s soundsuits have become increasingly relevant in the wake of recent violence against African Americans and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I think his work gives us a starting point for a conversation we really have to have,” says Laura Mott, the curator of a major retrospective of Cave’s work at the Cranbook Art Museum, in suburban Detroit. I’m just lucky that I have this medium as a way of expressing things that are difficult ...

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Photo by James Prinz Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Nick Cave Closes Detroit Stay in Rousing Performance | Detroit Free Press

Chicago artist Nick Cave wrapped up a seven-month metro Detroit invasion today with a rousing performance featuring local dancers, musicians and a visually stunning helping of his signature Soundsuits. The 90-minute performance at the Masonic Temple, which was a mixture of short films and colorful performance explosions, drew a large crowd to the 1,500-seat Jack White Theater and was a culmination of Cave’s stint in the Detroit area. He began in April, with a solo exhibit at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills and a series of public performance “invasions” over ensuing months in Detroit neighborhoods, downtown and the Dequindre Cut. His exhibit, “Here Hear,” will be on display through Sunday at Cranbrook. His work prominently features his Soundsuits, which are large, multicolored costumes that virtually bury the performer in streamers that dance and sway in response to the wearer’s movements. After Sunday’s show, the 1989 Cranbrook graduate said he was grateful ...

‘Hear’ today, gone Oct. 11 | Observer & Eccentric Media

“We seek him here. We seek him there. We seek him everywhere.” Though that was the sentiment in the 1900s for heroic Scarlet Pimpernel, the same could hold true today for famed artist Nick Cave. Now based in Chicago, Cave received his MFA in fiber 25 years ago from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. On June 20, Cave’s solo exhibition, “Here Hear” opened at the Cranbrook Art Museum. There’s only one week left before Cave packs up his celebrated soundsuits and recent sculptures on Oct. 11. Today at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, Cave will present “Figure This: Detroit,” which is a culmination of his seven months in Detroit – from dance labs, to musical performance series incorporating his soundsuits, summer camps and the filming of Up Right: Detroit which was shot in one day at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit, featuring youth and young adults from the Ruth Ellis Center. Produced, ...

Experimental Mindset: An Interview with Andrew Blauvelt | Art in America

There's change in the air at the Cranbrook Art Museum, where Andrew Blauvelt, a 1988 MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art's design department, begins his new job as director this month. He succeeds Gregory Wittkopp, who has held the dual role of director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research since 2011. Wittkopp steps down from his position at the museum in order to focus his efforts full time on the center. A practicing graphic designer for more than 20 years, Blauvelt comes to Cranbrook from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., where he was senior curator of design, research and publishing since 2013. Prior to that, he served as the Walker's chief of communications and audience engagement, and as the institution's design director and curator from 1998-2010. Blauvelt will be joined by his husband Scott Winter, who has been named Cranbrook's new ...

‘So many people hungry for creative impulse’: Nick Cave’s Detroit takeover | Knightblog

A dreamlike dirge accompanied the horses as they filed into a corral hemmed by a crowd of several hundred Detroiters enjoying the balmy breezes coming off the Detroit River. Despite the rather discordant score, the mood was giddy at Milliken State Park Saturday – an authentically warm day in late September can have that effect – as the 60 dancers from Wayne State University and Detroit School of Arts cavorted in horse costumes. During his four-month residency in Detroit and at Cranbrook Art Museum about 25 miles to the north, artist Nick Cave has opened up a lot of eyes to a city that has been unseen for so many years. He has mounted public spectacles like Saturday’s “Heard•Detroit” – in this case a procession of silky horse costumes in red, yellow, blue and brown – and with his Soundsuits, sculptural totems constructed of twigs, buttons, beads and birds that are on display ...

Jewellery Exhibition Focuses on Early Work by Harry Bertoia | Dezeen

An exhibition at the Cranbrook Museum of Art outside Detroit examines the jewellery of the mid-century American sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia. The show, called Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia, includes more than 30 pieces of jewellery and several monotype prints from his early career. It is the first exhibition dedicated to this area of his work. Bertoia – a graduate of Cranbrook who is better known for his furniture and sculptures – was an early pioneer of the modern studio jewellery movement, which promoted the pieces as wearable sculpture. He began making pieces in high school, and the medium was an important testing ground in his development as a artist and designer. The works in Bent, Cast & Forged vary widely in size, type, and style, including chunky rings, delicate plant-inspired brooches, and abstract nest-like hatpins. Nature, and microbiology in particular, was a strong influence on his forms, according to ...