Cranbrook Academy of Art Announces Its 2024–2025 Public Lecture Series
Clockwise from upper left: Jomo Tariku (Photo: Indrias Getachew Kassaye), Charisse Weston, Phong Bui (Photo: Nicola Delorme), Leonard Suryajaya, Folayemi Wilson (Photo: Nathan Keay).
Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Sept. 19, 2024 — Cranbrook Academy of Art announces its 2024-2025 public lecture series, which brings together an innovative group of artists, architects, curators, and designers.
The visiting artist lecture series will encourage us to think expansively about the role of creativity in building community and in shaping the world around us. Each visiting artist will spend time on campus, conducting studio visits, visiting departments, and sharing insights into their creative practice.
All lectures are free and open to the public, and are held in Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium. Lectures that are recorded will be available on the Cranbrook Academy of Art deSalle Auditorium YouTube channel. For more information about each speaker, and to keep up with new speakers as they are added, visit our website.
October 3, 2024, 6pm
Charisse Weston
Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose work contends with the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy through repetition, enfoldment, and concealment.
October 24, 2024, 6pm
The Knoll Lecture in Design: Brian Graham
Graham is an award-winning designer and founder and creative director of Graham Design, a studio specializing in contemporary furniture and related products for the workplace and healthcare markets.
November 7, 2024, 6pm
Axel Timm
Timm is a partner at raumlaborberlin, a Berlin-based collective of nine architects working at the intersection of architecture, city planning, art, and urban intervention.
November 21, 2024, 6pm
Leonard Suryajaya
Suryajaya is a contemporary artist whose work tests the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family. He uses photography, video, performance, and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential.
December 5, 2024, 6pm
Jomo Tariku
A furniture designer, Jomo’s designs draw inspiration from Africa’s rich cultural heritage, historical structures, traditional furniture, craft, colors, artifacts, landscapes, wildlife, and even hairstyles.
January 16, 2025, 6pm
Phong Bui
An artist, writer, and independent curator, Bui also serves as co-founder/publisher/artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer.
February 27, 2025, 6pm
Porchia Moore
Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) and an Associate Professor and Rotating Program Head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. She also serves as Co-Director of the Incluseum, an international cultural heritage collaboratory. Her writing and research are widely used for training and education in museums across the United States.
March 27, 2025, 6pm
Mike Cloud
Cloud is a painter and serves as an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. His work examines paintings as objects within a broader cultural system of objects, marks, symbols, motifs, and forms, and his technique blurs and blends elements into aesthetic compositions that interrogate the politics, contrivances, and language of painting and the artist’s complicity in its system of functions.
April 10, 2025, 6pm
Folayemi Wilson
Wilson is an object and image-maker whose work celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. They will share their work and process of mining history as material in their creative practice, and recent explorations into found textiles and other means of manipulating cloth.
