A Summery Splash of Color: Art abounds around metro Detroit to wrap up season | C & G Newspapers

METRO DETROIT — Looking for a way to entertain the family during these last few days of summer vacation? We’ve got you covered. Across metro Detroit, galleries and museums are hosting events and exhibitions to entertain and educate visitors of all ages. Just in time to bid farewell to summer, Cranbrook Art Museum is getting ready to celebrate the close of its Michigan-made exhibit, “Designing Summer: Objects of Escape.” According to Shelley Selim, assistant curator of the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections at Cranbrook, the show highlights the tradition of outdoor fun in Michigan during the summer. “It all sort of materialized when we received a gift of 20 picnic posters designed by Steve Fryholm, who graduated from the (Cranbrook Academy of Art) and worked for Herman Miller,” she said. “(The posters) advertise the annual company picnic; they’re beautiful and incredibly graphic images of summer picnic food like sweet corn, grilled chicken, fruit salad ...

Tagged: Designing Summer, Exhibitions, Michigan, Shelley Selim

“Designing Summer: Objects of Escape” featured on Ixiti.com

Whether along one of the Great Lakes, any of the numerous inland lakes, or the Detroit Riverfront, it is an undeniable fact that Michiganders spend their summer by the water. Going Up North is a standard phrase, and an even more common occurrence, whether for a long weekend or a week’s vacation. These locations epitomize the summer goal of escape, of leaving one’s cares (and responsibilities) behind. Designing Summer: Objects of Escape at the Cranbrook Art Museum through August 30th traces the evolution of the modern concept of summer vacations in Michigan, and how many of the objects that contribute to this notion of leisure time have their roots in Michigan. Beginning in the 1950s, a road trip or a visit to a state park was an easy means of escape. Exhibition curator Shelley Selim notes that the mid-century “was a period when Americans had an unprecedented amount of leisure time ...

Tagged: Designing Summer, Exhibition, Michigan, Pipsan Saarinan, Shelley Selim

14 Top Mid Century Modern Homes You Can Tour | In Collect

Designed by the highly influential architect Eliel Saarinen in the 1920s, this Art Deco masterpiece sits on the campus of the Cranbrook Art Museum. From 1930 through 1950, the structure served as the home and studio of Saarinen, Cranbrook’s first resident architect and the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s inaugural president and head of the Architecture Department, and his wife Loja, the first head of the Academy’s Weaving Department. Today, museum visitors can take staff-guided tours (offered May through October) of the residence, which features impeccably restored interiors outfitted with the Saarinens’ original furnishings, including Eliel’s delicately-veneered furniture and Loja’s magnificent textiles as well as early furniture designs by their son Eero Saarinen.

Tagged: Eliel Saarinen, Saarinen House, Tours

Nick Cave’s delicate balancing act in Detroit | Detroit Metro Times

I stood at the entrance of the Dequindre Cut Lafayette Park overpass, a few steps away from the Mies van der Rohe Historic District where I reside. I looked over the small bridge into the Dequindre valley shortly after checking my iPhone for the time. It was 4:01 p.m. on a hot July Sunday in Detroit. A Nick Cave Soundsuit performance was set to take place in Detroit’s Dequindre Cut, a relatively new pathway where the city’s residents can run and jog at leisure. Two figures in Cave’s handmade Soundsuits galloped down one of the entry ramps onto the Dequindre Cut; one in black and one in white, dancing angelically. The materials on the Soundsuit garments were draped effortlessly — like long, and thick strands of hair — as the dancers gracefully gallop up and down in the humid summer air. A live band playing “toy pop” lead by composer ...

Nick Cave on “Tackling Really Hard Issues” with Art | Hyperallergic

DETROIT — In 1989, while a postgraduate at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Nick Cave developed the first of his Soundsuits, for which he has become world-famous — sculptural bodysuits constructed from a range of found objects, which transform the wearer into a figure both highly visible and completely obscured. The Soundsuit was a means for Cave to process the intense vulnerability he felt as a black man during the Rodney King beating, which took place the same year he graduated with his MFA from Cranbrook, which boasts a lavish and sequestered campus in the affluent and mostly white Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. More than 25 years later, Laura Mott, curator of Contemporary Art and Design for the Cranbrook Art Museum, has collaborated with Cave to stage a monumental homecoming — a series of performances, installations, happenings, and publications collectively titled, Here Hear. In April, Cave began a series of Soundsuit photo shoots ...

Nick Cave “500 Words” | Artforum

Nick Cave’s solo exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, “Here Hear,” highlights the range of his multidisciplinary practice, from his iconic Soundsuits to newer sculpture, and also marks the artist’s return to a city that fostered his early practice. Organized in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Detroit School of Arts, and other community-engaged programs at the Ruth Ellis Center and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, the exhibition is on view through October 11, 2015. by Nick Cave, as told to Andrianna Campbell, Artforum DETROIT GAVE ME THE SOUL. It was a critical part of my education. When I was a graduate student at Cranbrook Academy, I learned so much, but it was in the house music dance community here in 1987–88 where I found myself. During undergrad, I had taken summer classes with Alvin Ailey in New York and I learned to dance. Coming from that training, I then ...

Nick Cave Hears Detroit | Art in America

A recent splashy headline in the New York Times style section proclaimed Detroit "the last stop on the L train." The article was one of several lifestyle dispatches the paper has published touting the economically depressed Midwestern city as a destination for young creatives disillusioned by the high rent, cramped spaces and rampant gentrification of New York neighborhoods like Bushwick, Brooklyn. "Here Hear," an exhibition of Chicago-based artist Nick Cave's work at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (through Oct. 11), shares the Times' optimism about Detroit's potential. Known for his vibrant aesthetic combining the disciplines of fashion, craft, performance and fine art, Cave has expanded his practice to include public engagement and performance. For the Cranbrook show, Cave has taken take the city of Detroit as his muse, creating his most ambitious series of programs to date intended to engage citizens. Rather than import change from the ...

Nick Cave launches ‘Hear Here’ Dance Labs this week | Detroit Metro Times

Chicago-based artist and Cranbrook alum Nick Cave has been appearing around Detroit in his colorful soundsuits as part of his Hear Here exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum. The public will have a chance to see Cave's soundsuits in action during a series of live performances that will be held in and around Detroit starting this Saturday. For the performances, Cave has partnered with local dancers and musicians and given each group a "box" of supplies they will use to create a live performance. The dance labs performance schedule is below. You can also catch rehearsals at MOCAD, which are open to the public to view — check the official site for the schedule. Sunday, July 19 Starts at 4 p.m. at the Ruth Ellis Center, 77 Victor St., Highland Park. Choreographer: Marcus White. Musician: DJ John Collins. Sunday, July 26 4 p.m. at the Dequindre Cut, E. Lafayette Street & St. Aubin Street (The Dequindre Cut is a below-level greenway that ...

Detroit’s Outdoor Art Earns National Attention | Deadline Detroit

Outdoor art has long flourished in Detroit. There's the most obvious: the Heidelberg Project on the east side and west-side murals in the Grand River Creative Corridor. Now those installations and others -- including free "Here Hear" shows for four months by fabric sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave of Chicago -- draw in-depth attention from Melena Ryzik of The New York Times: Outdoor art has long flourished in Detroit. There's the most obvious: the Heidelberg Project on the east side and west-side murals in the Grand River Creative Corridor. Now those installations and others -- including free "Here Hear" shows for four months by fabric sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave of Chicago -- draw in-depth attention from Melena Ryzik of The New York Times: Public art has long had a home in Detroit, with its expansive vacated spaces and ambitious class of D.I.Y. makers. But lately, the back-lot murals, pop-up sculpture parks ...

For Detroit Artists, Almost Anything Goes | The New York Times

DETROIT — The Chicago artist Nick Cave was playing Santa Claus. Mr. Cave, known for his Soundsuits, costume-like sculptures that blend movement and noise, had enormous boxes delivered last Saturday to local dancers, a choreographer and a D.J. rehearsing here. The surprise contents would inspire their dance performance a week later, as part of “Here Hear,” Mr. Cave’s four-month-long exhibition and free performance series throughout Detroit. Vibrant Soundsuits emerged from the boxes. “It’s wearable!” cried Erika Stowall, a dancer. “Can you move?” the choreographer, Marcus White, asked Mike Springer, tall as a spruce in his raffia costume. Mr. Springer spun and jumped, releasing a wave of rustles and swishes. Mr. Cave and Mr. White’s collaboration will be staged on Sunday at the Ruth Ellis Center, which serves homeless and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. The idea, Mr. Cave said, was to get “outside of the conventional ways of how we see performance ...