Heather McGill Announces Departure from Cranbrook Academy of Art
Served as Artist-in-Residence for 25 Years
Bloomfield Hills, Mich., November 15, 2016 — Cranbrook Academy of Art announced today that Heather McGill, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Sculpture Department, will leave the Academy at the end of the 2016- 2017 academic year. McGill notified the Academy of her decision last week.
McGill’s career at Cranbrook began in 1991, when she came to the Academy from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in New York where she had served as an Assistant Professor. She studied at the University of California at Davis and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Over the course of her career, McGill has received grants for both permanent and temporary installations from the National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Arts Council, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. As a two-year Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, she designed a piece that became part of the permanent collection after the work travelled throughout Europe. In 1999, she received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and in 2011, a Kresge Artist Fellowship. She has lectured and served as a panelist at many universities and conferences across the country.
A former California resident, McGill created installations throughout the West Coast exploring the historical, environmental, and cultural systems specific to each site. Outdoor permanent sculpture includes works in the city of San Rafael and for the State of California at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Sanctuary. Her work is included in the public collections of the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, Sprint, Albright-Knox Gallery, Fidelity Investments, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Compuware, Miami Art Museum, Kresge Art Museum, Wellington Management, Progressive Art Collection, Hallmark, Daimler Chrysler World Headquarters, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts.
McGill has participated in group and one-person shows at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Knoedler and Company, New York, New York; L.A. Louver, Venice, California; TZ’Art and Company, New York, New York; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain, France; Serpentine Gallery, London; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Seville Museum, Seville, Spain; William Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington; The Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin; Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; and San Jose Museum, San Jose, California.
“During her tenure at Cranbrook Academy of Art, McGill served as a mentor and an inspiration to students who have gone on to become artists and educators at world-class institutions around the world,” says Christopher Scoates, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum. “She has been a fixture on our campus for 25 years, and has left an indelible mark not only on her department, but on the Academy itself. Her dedication to her students and the Academy never wavered, and we will miss her steady leadership. We wish her all the best in her future projects.”
A search committee is being formed at this time to begin the process of finding McGill’s replacement.
