Summer Shows: 25 Noteworthy Exhibitions Feature Black Artists | Culture Type

THIS SUMMER, MAJOR CITIES are presenting major exhibitions featuring the work of important African American artists. In greater Detroit, Nick Cave (shown above) is staging pop-up performances showcasing his mesmerizing Soundsuits in conjunction with a museum exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, his first in Michigan. In New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem is mounting the first solo museum exhibition of veteran painter Stanley Whitney. Baltimore photographer Devin Allen, a novice whose image of police protests landed on the cover of Time magazine, is getting his first-ever exhibition at the city’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. There are offerings in Chicago and London, too. The greatest draw is in Los Angeles where the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting the first major museum retrospective of the late assemblage artist Noah Purifoy, and at the Hammer Museum, after exhibiting around the world, Los ...

Nick Cave X Detroit | Cultured Magazine

Nick Cave has taken performance art to another level with his seven-month experiential “Performance Series” in Detroit, and the museum exhibition “Here Hear” at Cranbrook Art Museum, which in addition to presenting his famous Soundsuit sculptures, also serves as a living document of this ambitious project. In effect, Cave, with the cooperation of numerous other parties in Detroit, has turned the city into a living canvas. Here, we talk with Cave about his ambitious project, collective dreaming and the Cranbrook legacy. This is a seriously ambitious project! Did you wake up one day and say I want to blow the roof off Detroit—and keep it off for seven months? If I could keep it off forever, I would. You will be making a rare Soundsuit performance yourself, so I was hoping you could tell us about the evolution of this piece. I first created a Soundsuit in the aftermath of the Rodney King beatings ...

Nick Cave dons mantle of an artist who inspires and elicits introspection | The Washington Post

CHICAGO — Until he went to art school, Nick Cave considered himself an artist first and a black artist second. Then he showed up at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit in 1986 to get his MFA and discovered he was the only minority student on campus. In an instant, his perspective fundamentally changed. “I literally was in a state of shock,” he says. “It was the first time I ever had to deal with my race and to think of myself as a black male.” As a celebrated alumni, he is returning to Cranbrook this summer and fall to rectify the isolation he felt nearly 30 years ago with hopes to inspire and influence young black artists throughout Detroit. There will be an exhibition of his work — colorful masked and wearable sculptures he calls “soundsuits” — which is serving as the first phase of a six-month series throughout the city that ...

Tagged: Nick Cave, Washington Post

Nick Cave exhibit launches in Detroit | Knightblog

Now through the fall, Detroit will become the backdrop for artist Nick Cave’s most ambitious project to date, including seven months of events and his first solo exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, all funded by the Knight Arts Challenge. Here Cranbrook Curator Laura Mott writes about the launch of Cave’s exhibit at the museum, including his signature embellished costumes known as Soundsuits, which will be on display through Oct. 11.  Nick Cave: Here Hear lived up to its celebratory title last weekend with the exhibition opening at Cranbrook Art Museum, the launch of the publicationNick Cave: Greetings From Detroit, the film screening at the historic Redford Theatre, and performances at The Artist Village. Whew!  Thanks to you Detroit, it was downright incredible. The soundsuit invasion photo shoots we staged last spring with Detroit-based photographer Corine Vermeulen are now exquisitely compiled into the large format postcard book Nick Cave: Greetings From Detroit — ...

International artist brings latest exhibit to metro Detroit | WDIV – Click On Detroit

WDIV-TV in Detroit aired a segment about the Nick Cave exhibition on June 25th, available online at Click On Detroit.

Cranbrook Art Museum Celebrates “Nick Cave: Here Hear” | Blouin Artinfo

Blouin ArtInfo shares an online gallery of 11 images from Nick Cave's Brightmoor Community Events at the Redford Theatre and The Artist Village.

[Exclusive] A 30-Second Tour of Nick Cave’s Detroit Takeover | Vice Magazine – The Creator’s Project

Throughout the summer and fall artist Nick Cave will be dancing in the streets of Detroit in his whimsical 'soundsuits.' For Cave's city-wide takeover for Here Hear, the artist is staging participatory performances including HEARD Detroit, a restaging of his 2013 HEARD•NY Grand Central Terminal performance. In Detroit, Cave will dance not with professionals, as he did in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall, but with 60 high school students. In a 7,000 square foot exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, the museum of his alma mater, Cave is also showing the largest collection of his work of sculptural soundsuits, video, and paintings, to-date. “I get the museums and the galleries, I know how to do that,” says Cave, whose mission in Detroit is to give back to the city what it gave to him nearly 25 years ago, to The Creators Project. “But what I don’t know is, when I bring ...

Nick Cave Made a Soundsuit Inspired By Trayvon Martin | artnet News

Nick Cave has taken the Detroit area by storm with "Here Hear," a much-anticipated exhibition of his ornate Soundsuits and other newly-commissioned artworks at the Cranbrook Art Museum in the suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The exhibition includes a variety of summer happenings like dance labs, performances, educational programs, and a forthcoming book called Greetings From Detroit. While Cave's enigmatic, otherworldly Soundsuits are as vibrant as ever, there's one that holds an especially timely message: TM 13 was created in 2015 in memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager who was fatally shot by former neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman in 2012. The case again made national news when Zimmerman was acquitted a year later, and has remained a topic of discussion as police brutality, racial profiling, and systemic violence toward black men continues to crop up in headlines across the country. Enclosed in the woven net, the figure resembles a hunted animal that has been captured. The toe of a single sneaker pops out from beneath the covering. The title of the work refers to Martin's ...

Nick Cave Takes Detroit | Interview Magazine

Like much of America, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave watched the 1991 video of the LAPD beating Rodney King. King's mortality and fragility scared Cave so much that he immediately went to the studio and began creating a form of protection. The wearable suit of armor made of twigs marked the beginning of Cave's now-renowned series of soundsuits. Prior to the L.A. riots the artist made large-scale paintings, but since then he has become a public performer who grapples with blackness, sexuality, and the idea of one's body. This weekend, Cave embarked on a series of new performances and saw the opening of his 7,000-square foot retrospective, "Here Hear," at the museum of his alma mater, Cranbrook Academy of Art, just outside of Detroit. "The soundsuits have taken on a life of their own," Cave says of the project's 25-year duration. The bright whimsical sculptural works have grown alongside the artist's practice ...

Photo Gallery: Nick Cave ‘Here Hear’ Event at Redford Theatre and Artist Village | Detroit Free Press

Photo Gallery of 82 photos by Christopher M. Bjornberg. Artist Nick Cave's Soundsuits were a centerpiece attraction of the "Here Hear" event at Redford Theatre and Artist Village Detroit on Sunday, June 21, 2015. In conjunction with his exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Cave is hosting so-called invasion events in Detroit throughout the summer. Sunday's featured performances by the Gabriel Brass Band, Passalacqua and Tunde Olaniran.