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

Cranbrook to Bring Nick Cave’s ‘Biggest, Baddest Performance’ to Detroit | IXITI/Culture Source

The Knight Foundation announced on Monday that Cranbrook Art Museum will receive a matching grant of $150,000 to mount the ambitious project. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge funds ideas that engage and enrich Detroit through the arts.

Cranbrook Art Museum and Nick Cave Announce “The Biggest, Baddest Performance of All Time!” Thanks to Support From Knight Arts Challenge Detroit

Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Oct. 6, 2014 - Cranbrook Art Museum and artist Nick Cave will launch “The Biggest, Baddest Performance of All Time!” thanks to support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight Foundation announced today that Cranbrook Art Museum will receive a matching grant of $150,000 to mount the ambitious project, which will begin early next year and take place throughout 2015. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge funds ideas that engage and enrich Detroit through the arts. Cranbrook’s vision for the project includes impromptu flash mob Soundsuit invasions throughout the city, dance labs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, a new performance by the artist filmed in Detroit, costuming workshops with children, and the culmination of it all, Figure This: Detroit, a massive processional and performance downtown. This sweeping project will be undertaken in conjunction with Cave’s solo exhibition Here Hear, which ...

Wallpapers by William Morris

CRANBROOK SIGHTINGS: INSIDE THE VAULT William Morris A Collection of Seventy-Two Wallpaper Samples Designed 1864–1890, printed 1932, or earlier Printer: A. Sanderson and Sons, Ltd., London, England Hand-printed wood block prints in distemper colors on wove paper Gift of Mrs. William H. Hansen CAM 1991.17 You may remember this past spring when my colleague, Shoshana Resnikoff, wrote a blog post about May Morris's Bed Hangings in celebration of her birthday. Well today on the blog we take a look at her father, William Morris (1834–1896), designer, poet, novelist, socialist, translator of Icelandic sagas(!), and all-around creative visionary who shaped the Arts and Crafts movement in England and its many iterations throughout Europe and the United States.Pimpernel, designed 1876; Lily and Pomegranate, designed 1886.Morris despised the cheap, mass-manufactured goods and deteriorating social and labor conditions that characterized England after the Industrial Revolution, and reverted back to medieval visual language and production techniques in his art and design work as ...

Tagged: Arts and Crafts Movement, Shelley Selim, Wallpaper, William Morris