Perfomance Artist Nick Cave Plans July-Oct. Events ‘To Give Back’ to Detroit | Deadline Detroit

More coolness is coming our way. It involves sculptor Nick Cave, a performance artist not to be mistaken for the Australian musician-songwriter of that name. At ARTnews, a venerable Manhattan magazine, M.H. Miller reports on plans for his largest project: Cave, whose Soundsuit sculptures have become something of a fixture in contemporary art, will spearhead an expansive exhibition in Detroit beginning this summer that will consist predominantly of public performances and events throughout the metropolitan area. The show, called “Here Hear,” will be more or less headquartered at the Cranbrook Art Museum in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Cave graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. The project begins unofficially next month, when Cave, who is now based in Chicago, will travel to Detroit, don one of his Soundsuits and pose at various locations throughout the city -- including the Michigan Assembly Plant and in spots around the Mexican Town and ...

Sound of the City: A Detroit Renaissance, Courtesy of Nick Cave | ARTnews

The artist Nick Cave, whose Soundsuit sculptures have become something of a fixture in contemporary art, will spearhead an expansive exhibition in Detroit beginning this summer that will consist predominantly of public performances and events throughout the metropolitan area. The show, called “Here Hear,” will be more or less headquartered at the Cranbrook Art Museum in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills–Cave graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. The project begins unofficially next month, when Cave, who is now based in Chicago, will travel to Detroit, don one of his Soundsuits and pose at various locations throughout the city, including the Michigan Assembly Plant and in spots around the Mexican Town and Eastern Market neighborhoods. (These photographs will become a book of postcards called Greetings from Detroit and serve as promotion for the show.) June 20 will mark the beginning of a number of performances. Cave will work ...

Nick Cave to Take Over Detroit With Colorful Soundsuits and Pop-Up Dance Shows | Observer / Gallerist

Get ready Detroit, Nick Cave is coming for you—Soundsuits in tow. For the next seven months, the Cranbrook Art Museum and the greater city of Detroit will play host to the artist’s most ambitious project to date. Mr. Cave, a 1989 graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, will return to the city this spring to launch a museum exhibition of massive scope, titled “Nick Cave: Here Hear,” which will also include a series of free city-wide public performances and staged events beginning in April and running through October. Mr. Cave’s pseudo-residency is fueled by the personal philosophy he describes as “collective dreaming,” an impetus for drawing on community-driven and locally produced site specific projects. “My goal is to work with these groups and those who live in and love the city to reimagine Detroit as an always-surprising environment of creativity, excitement, and engagement. My dreams for the city are big, because I believe it ...

Tagged: Nick Cave

Cranbrook Opens Exhibit of Bertoia Jewelry | Oakland Press

A new exhibit opens March 14 at Cranbrook Art Museum, featuring the jewelry designed by Harry Bertoia, one of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s most illustrious alumni and one of a cadre of artists educated at Cranbrook during the 1930s and ’40s who influenced American design in the mid-20th century. A new exhibition running March 14 through Nov. 29 at Cranbrook Art Museum, “Bent, Cast, and Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia,” will display 30 of Bertoia’s jewelry works. Bertoia was born in Italy in 1915, but graduated from Detroit’s Cass Technical High School in the early 1930s after his father emigrated to the United States. In 1937, he arrived at Cranbrook, where he remained until 1943 — first as a student and then as an instructor. Before his death in 1978, Bertoia had won acclaim for his work as a furniture designer — the woven wire chair was one of his signature ...

Curating a Contemporary Cabinet of Curiosities Hyperallergic

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — The centuries-old tradition of the Wunderkammer is enjoying a resurgence of late, with cabinets of curiosities on display from the Chazen Museum of Art to Gagosian Gallery, and vitrine artists like Edmund de Waal and Joseph Beuys being hailed as champions of the medium. With its tendency to display a widely variety of objects, the cabinet of curiosities poses a particularly scintillating gambit to curators, who are typically limited by the artist, period, geographic area, or movement of a particular show. One might say Wunderkammern display nothing so much as the perspective of their arrangers. The Cranbrook Hall of Wonders: Artworks, Objects, and Natural Curiosities at the Cranbrook Art Museum does seem to indicate a great deal about its co-curators, Laura Mott (curator of contemporary art and design) and Shelley Selim (2013–2015 Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections fellow), particularly a sense of playfulness and real joy in the ...

Cranbrook Academy of Art Welcomes Kenneth Frampton on March 12

Bloomfield Hills, Mich., March 2, 2015 – Cranbrook Academy of Art is delighted to welcome legendary British architect Kenneth Frampton to campus for a public lecture on Thursday, March 12. Frampton trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. After practicing for a number of years in the United Kingdom and in Israel, he served as the editor of the British magazine Architectural Design. He is currently the Ware Professor of Architecture at the GSAPP, Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), and an updated fourth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History (2007). Frampton will deliver his lecture "A Genealogy of Modern Architecture" on Thursday, March 12, at 6pm in deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum. His lecture will discuss a new book ...

Tagged: Robert F. Swanson

Cranbrook Art Museum Presents Bent, Cast, and Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., February 10, 2015 – Cranbrook Art Museum is pleased to announce that the exhibition Bent, Cast, and Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia will open on March 14, 2015. This is the first Museum exhibition devoted exclusively to Harry Bertoia’s designs for jewelry. It will run through November 29, 2015. The exhibition will open with an exclusive ArtMembers’ reception on March 13, from 6-8pm, featuring a lecture from Celia Bertoia, Harry Bertoia’s youngest daughter and director of the Harry Bertoia Foundation. Memberships will be available for purchase at the door that evening at half-price. Bertoia (b. 1915 - d. 1978) is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and a former Metalsmithing instructor. He has received international acclaim for his woven wire metal furniture and large bronze and copper sculptures, but his earliest exploration of the medium originated in jewelry design while still a student at Cass Tech High School in Detroit ...

Tagged: Harry Bertoia

Cranbrook Art Museum Presents MR. MDWST – A REAL GOOD TIME by BEVERLY FRE$H

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., January 21, 2015 – As part of a new series showcasing emerging contemporary artists, Cranbrook Art Museum welcomes Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate Zack Ostrowski for his new exhibition MR. MDWST – A REAL GOOD TIME by BEVERLY FRE$H. The exhibition will open with an exclusive ArtMembers’ reception and performance on February 6, 2015, from 6-8pm. Memberships can be purchased at the door the evening of the event. The exhibition opens to the public on February 7 and runs through March 22, 2015. MR. MDWST (a truncation of Mister Midwest) is a continuation of the adventures of Beverly Fre$h—a stylized autobiographical character that doubles as an artist persona and stage name for Zack Ostrowski. Like a postmodern tale of the picaresque, Ostrowski has traveled extensively over the last two years as Beverly Fre$h on a quest to understand, reconfigure, and interrupt the social and cultural rituals of the rural Midwest. He ...

Tagged: Beverly Fre$h, Harry Bertoia, MR. MDWST, Nick Cave, Performance

Cranbrook Art Museum Announces New Exhibition Series: The Cranbrook Hall of Wonders, Theater of the Mind, and Iris Eichenberg: Bend

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., Oct. 29, 2014 – Cranbrook Art Museum announces an ambitious new series of exhibitions today, designed to captivate the imagination, showcase the depth of the collections on Cranbrook’s campus, and highlight the pioneering work of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Metalsmithing Artist-in-Residence. The Cranbrook Hall of Wonders: Artworks, Objects, and Natural Curiosities draws its inspiration from sixteenth-century “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Wunderkammers,” and will showcase art, natural oddities, and anthropological discoveries side-by-side – pulling items from the collections of both the Art Museum and Institute of Science. Theater of the Mind focuses on the imagination of the audience, with light and sound installations accompanying artworks from a broad range of artists, including Hans Rosenström, Anthony McCall, Bruce Nauman, Roni Horn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and others. And Iris Eichenberg: Bend is Cranbrook Art Museum’s first solo exhibition featuring Cranbrook Academy of Art Metalsmithing Artist-in-Residence, Iris Eichenberg, and is a new body ...

Tagged: Harry Bertoia

CAM Curator Laura Mott interview on SLICE Ann Arbor

Cranbrook Art Museum's Curator of Contemporary Art and Design Laura Mott discusses what elements make a great art exhibition, her favorite Andy Warhol designed album cover and more on the art and culture blog SLICE Ann Arbor. Read the full interview here. Laura Mott serves as Curator of Contemporary Art and Design at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She assumed this role in November 2013 and is responsible for the Museum’s exhibition programs, as well as the development and presentation of its collection of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design. Laura began her career in New York working with curator Lawrence Rinder on the Whitney Museum of American Art 2002 Biennial exhibition. After attending graduate school at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York, Laura moved to San Francisco where she served as Curator/Assistant Director of Mission 17, a not-for-profit institution. ...

Tagged: Laura Mott