Ken Aptekar uses the history of art, primarily classical painting, as his lexicon to bring past into present. He activates painting to create a dialogue with contemporary viewers. To this end, Aptekar appropriates images from existing works, then transforms the composition, color, and scale, often radically. He links these new interpretations to the original historical sources to(…)
Danish ceramist Anders Ruhwald’s series of seven site-sensitive installations in Cranbrook’s Saarinen House, providing the ideal backdrop for Ruhwald’s continued investigations into the nature of Modernism—specifically Scandinavian Modernism—and will serve to heighten the dialogue that his work promotes within the overlapping fields of art, craft, and design. Although Ruhwald has presented other site-sensitive installations in(…)
For more than a century and a half, artists and writers have explored altered states of consciousness, finding creativity in delirium and the derangement of the senses. French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote of the effects of wine, opium and hashish on the mind and senses in Artificial Paradises (1860), describing their beneficial as(…)
Through new works of video, audio, and photography rooted in The Wolfsonian’s extensive collection of materials depicting work and working figures, Describing Labor interrogates our relationship to the labor that forges the physical world. Internationally recognized for projects that address the most pressing challenges of collective memory, political identity, and historical space, Shalev-Gerz conceived Describing(…)
Based in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognized for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigation into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space. For over 20 years her work has focused on interventions and projects in public space, taking the(…)
German painter Peter Zimmermann draws inspiration from digital images, which he distorts to abstraction and recreates using as many as 20 layers of epoxy resin, resulting in paintings and site-specific installations with overlapping, often psychedelic shapes whose glossy surfaces mirror the viewer. Peter Zimmermann, Part 2
Based in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognized for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigation into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space. For over 20 years her work has focused on interventions and projects in public space, taking the(…)
The Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen (1965) is an internationally renowned, conceptual artist. His groundbreaking work deals with diversity and identity. Over the past decade Vanmechelen has collaborated with scientists from different disciplines. That earned him an honorary doctorate at the University of Hasselt this year. Just before the millennium year 2000, Koen Vanmechelen launched his(…)
Beverly Fishman received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977, and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1980. She subsequently taught at the College of New Rochelle, New York, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she has been Artist-in-Residence(…)
The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is an artistic-scientific, biocultural hybridization through which Koen Vanmechelen tackles some of life’s most existential questions: questions about our identity as individuals and as a species, but also questions about diversity and beauty as vital forces behind the evolution of life. The chicken, this seemingly banal animal, having co-evolved with homo sapiens for(…)