Martha Mysko Featured in Detroit Cultural, First Solo Museum Exhibition on View at MOCAD
Partial view of Martha Mysko: Retail Therapy on view at MOCAD, April 25-June 21, 2026. Photo: Daniel Ribar.
Cranbrook Academy of Art is pleased to celebrate Artist-in-Residence and Co-Head of Painting, and alumna, Martha Mysko (MFA Painting 2011), whose first solo museum exhibition, Retail Therapy, is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) through June 21, 2026. In conjunction with the exhibition, Detroit Cultural has published an in-depth interview with Mysko as part of its Spring 2026 issue, conducted by editor Danny VanZandt.
Retail Therapy brings together two large-scale installations and a wall-based digital work, each rooted in Mysko’s distinctive practice of moving fluidly between painting, installation, and digital art. Her process begins with sourcing — scouring eBay, thrift stores, and discount retailers for objects and materials that carry both aesthetic and cultural weight — and builds through cycles of scanning, photographing, printing, reprinting, and physical manipulation. The result is work that is at once visually sumptuous and critically alert: concerned with class, taste, consumerism, and the surprising places where modernist aesthetics surface in everyday life.
The installation “A Green Thought and a Blue Shade” takes its title and a point of departure from Helen Frankenthaler’s painting “A Green Thought in a Green Shade,” incorporating scanned sections of both the painting and a low-resolution online feature on the recent Grey Gardens house renovation — imagery fractured and layered through digital collage. The reinstalled Vanity Room, previously shown at Spring Break Art Fair in New York, has been reconfigured for MOCAD’s architecture, expanding back to its original scale. Mysko describes the effect: she wants her work to reveal what she calls “indexes of action” — evidence of process, use, and layered history made visible in the work itself. The wall piece “My Monet 2” began with a Monet-inspired bedsheet found at a thrift store and was constructed through digital manipulation of an earlier work, “My Monet,” a reflection on how familiarity with modernist painting often comes not through original works but through their reproductions on mass-produced goods.
In conversation with Detroit Cultural, Mysko speaks candidly about the exhibition’s origins in color trend forecasting and visual merchandising, the compression and expansion that governs her approach to site and installation, and how teaching MFA students at Cranbrook keeps her in sustained, critical dialogue with the possibilities of contemporary practice. “Being so actively and regularly engaged in conversations around contemporary art, and thinking critically about work is inspiring,” she says. “I am fortunate to have a community of ambitious artist students to be around in the day to day.”
Mysko has exhibited locally at Cranbrook Art Museum, Wasserman Projects, and Belle Isle Viewing Room, and other venues across the country.
Retail Therapy is on view at MOCAD, 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit, through June 21, 2026.
Learn more:
Indexes of Action: In Conversation with Martha Mysko – Detroit Cultural
