Cranbrook Alumna Karyn Olivier Opens "Bend, Break, Mend" at MOCAD August 8
Karyn Olivier, photo by Ryan Collard. Courtesy of the artist
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Cranbrook Academy of Art is proud to celebrate alumna Karyn Olivier (MFA Ceramics 2001), whose solo exhibition Bend, Break, Mend opens this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), on view August 8 through October 11, 2026. The exhibition is presented as part of MOCAD’s twentieth anniversary programming and is supported by the 2024 Ellsworth Kelly Award, a $45,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
MOCAD’s opening weekend for Bend, Break, Mend includes a full day of public programming this Saturday, August 8: a Family Day from 11 am–3 pm, which will offer hands-on activities exploring the exhibition, followed by an in-conversation event from 3–5 pm, with Olivier, scholar Samantha A. Noël, and curator Jova Lynne.
Karyn Olivier, Detail of ‘Powers of 10’ (Home Kit), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Curated by fellow Academy alumna and MOCAD’s Co-Director and Artistic Director, Jova Lynne (MFA Photography 2017), Bend, Break, Mend brings together recent works alongside newly commissioned sculptures grounded in material conditions and histories of Detroit. Olivier’s practice moves through sculpture, installation, and public intervention to examine how landscapes, materials, and built environments carry the weight of historical memory. Working with salvaged, industrial, and transformed matter, objects shaped by labor, weathering, extraction, and use, she approaches material as an active record of time. Drawing from the textures and residues of the region, its industrial infrastructures, waterways, architectures, and postindustrial terrains, Olivier considers how landscapes absorb the traces of migration, labor, extraction, and collective survival. As a former resident of Southeastern Michigan, she brings an intimate sensitivity to Detroit and the broader region.
As Trinidad’s ART AFRICA Magazine recently noted in its coverage of the exhibition, Bend, Break, Mend places these material histories in dialogue with structures such as stepwells, sundials, and excavated ground, forms that measure time through shadow, erosion, depth, and movement rather than chronology alone. Rather than treating history as fixed, the exhibition reveals it as something continually reshaped through accumulation, fragmentation, and repair, asking how landscapes absorb the traces of human experience while remaining sites of renewal and possibility.
Karyn Olivier, Detail of ‘Power Line, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Brooklyn, Olivier earned her BA at Dartmouth College. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Prospect.6 Triennial, the Malta Biennale, the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, and the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Dakar, Senegal. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, among many others.
Her permanent public commissions include Approach at Newark Airport’s Terminal A, Dinah Memorial at Stenton Park in Philadelphia, and Her Luxuriant Soil at Bethel Burying Ground in Philadelphia. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Olivier’s Driftwood, Door, Man, and Boat (Gorée Island/Matinicus Island) (2023), a recent acquisition, is currently on view in Cranbrook Art Museum’s Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection, an ongoing exhibition featuring Cranbrook artists.
Olivier will also return to campus to give a talk at Cranbrook Art Museum to coincide with the closing of her MOCAD exhibition this October.
Learn more:
Where the Land Remembers – Art Africa Magazine
12 Don’t Miss Events in Metro Detroit in August – Hour Detroit Magazine
Frame Work: It’s Summer at Detroit’s Contemporary Art Museum – Axios Detroit
Karyn Olivier: Bend, Break, Mend– Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
