‘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 ...

Cranbrook Art Museum Curator Shelley Selim Gives Bertoia Jewelry Lecture at Knoll New York | Knoll

Cranbrook Art Museum Curator Shelley Selim presented a lecture on the jewelry of Harry Bertoia at the Knoll New York Showroom on September 30. The talk was a companion program to the current exhibition "BENT, CAST & FORGED: THE JEWELRY OF HARRY BERTOIA," on view at Cranbrook Art Museum through November 29. It is one of a series of events and programs this year surrounding the CENTENNIAL of Harry Bertoia's birth, hosted at Knoll showrooms in MILAN, NEW YORK and LONDON. The exhibition is the first of its kind devoted entirely to Harry Bertoia's jewelry designs, and it has an appropriate venue; Bertoia was a student at Cranbrook Academy, and, as Selim discussed, his work took on a different confidence, maturity and focus while he studied there. In the lecture, Selim explored the origins and development of Bertoia's famously prolific investigations of organic and natural forms, movement, light, sound and metal materials, ...

Uniquely Detroit: Nick Cave’s Sound Suits | WDIV-Detroit

Cranbrook Art Museum Director Greg Wittkopp discusses Nick Cave's Hear Hear project, with footage of the Heard•Detroit rehearsal and performance.

Experiencing Architecture Through ‘Hippie Modernism’ and Retrospectives | New York Times

In 1965, four artists bought seven acres in southeastern Colorado, intending to make live-in works of art. Their communal project came to be known as Drop City, where residents lived in zonohedron domes of their own creation, sometimes constructed of automobile roofs and other scavenged materials. One dome, made of a fluorescent-painted lattice filled in with Mylar panels, made the trip east in 1968 to the Brooklyn Museum, filled with a five-foot-wide, round, spinning, “collaborative” work of art — “The Ultimate Painting” — that changed composition when illuminated by strobe lights. After the show closed, both dome and painting were lost — but this fall they will re-emerge in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center’s new exhibition, “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia.”Opening Oct. 24, it features a re-creation of the Drop City dome and painting by members of the original commune, along with other full-scale installations that will suggest the ...

Nick Cave’s ‘Soundsuits’ Hit Detroit | Women’s Wear Daily

DETROIT — Can art help invigorate Detroit? Nick Cave, who considers himself a messenger first and artist second, thinks so. Cave, the performance artist best known for his vibrant soundsuits that have been cited for inspiring the collections of designers like Kenzo and reside in the homes of celebrity art collectors like Jay Z and Beyoncé, says the timing was right for “Here Hear,” his current and longest-running solo exhibit at Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, which closes Oct. 11. “They invited me to do the exhibit. I said I would only do it if I could do some outreach work in Detroit. It all happened to be at the same time. It happened with Detroit being on the map,” says Cave, a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and professor of fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “There’s a shift happening in Detroit with the artists ...

Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum Announce Leadership Changes

Andrew Blauvelt Named Director of Cranbrook Art Museum Gregory Wittkopp Assumes Leadership in Expanded Role as Director of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research Scott Winter Named Director of Development of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Aug. 26, 2015 – Christopher Scoates, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum, announced a series of leadership changes today at both the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum. Gregory Wittkopp has held the dual role of Director of Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research since 2011. In order to focus his full-time attention on the Center, he will step down from his position at Cranbrook Art Museum next month. Andrew Blauvelt, a 1988 graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Design Department, will become the new Director of Cranbrook Art Museum. Blauvelt is currently the Senior Curator, Design, Research, and Publishing, at ...

Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Gregory Wittkopp, Scott Winter

Gregory Wittkopp Named Full-Time Director of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research

Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Aug. 25, 2015 – - Following the successful run of recent exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum, including Nick Cave: Here Hear, Cranbrook has announced that Gregory Wittkopp will assume leadership of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, becoming the Center’s first full-time Director in September. This move is a natural evolution of Greg’s work at Cranbrook, given that, for the past 30 years, his career has focused on stewarding Cranbrook’s collections and architecture. Wittkopp has held the dual role of Director of Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research since 2011. In order to focus his full-time attention on the Center, he will step down from his position at Cranbrook Art Museum next month. An announcement on his replacement at Cranbrook Art Museum is forthcoming. Under his leadership, the Museum conceived and completed its 2007-2011 renovation and construction project that included the addition of ...

Tagged: Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Gregory Wittkopp