Lecture Series

Lectures Held in Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium

All lectures are held in Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium and are free to ArtMembers and students with identification, and included with Museum admission for the general public. Cranbrook Art Museum is located at 39221 Woodward Ave., Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

The Public Lecture series at Cranbrook Academy of Art is a critical and idiosyncratic look into the conversations and inquiry that drives the 10 departments in Art, Architecture and Design. Our open structure allows for a responsive approach to curating our lecture series so that the conversations on campus are timely and engage urgent issues in our fields. Our open pedagogy means between 30-50 visiting artists, designers, curators and thinkers are bringing their research to our studios and impacting the practices of this community. This spring we are thrilled to have John Corso Esquivel join us as our Critical Studies and Humanities fellow, John will give two public lectures throughout the spring.

Upcoming Lectures:

 

STEPHANIE SYJUCO
April 20, 3pm 

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic and flows of capital to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods, presenting parasitic art counterfeiting events and developing alternative vending economies and other speculative propositions.

Hosted by the Fiber Department

 

AMANDA HUNT
April 23, 6pm

Amanda Hunt serves on the curatorial staff for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles as the director of education and public programs. She was previously an associate curator at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized shows about Rashaad Newsome and Lorraine O’Grady. Hunt curated Portland2014: A Biennial of Contemporary Art, presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, and was a curator at the non-profit art space LA >< ART from 2011-2014 where she organized former Studio Museum Artist-in-Residence Steffani Jemison’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, as well as produced public art projects with Anna Sew Hoy, Sam Falls, and Talia Chetrit, among others. Hunt also helped to produce two major initiatives in Los Angeles, including the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, co-produced by LAXART and the Getty Research Institute, and Made in LA 2012, the first Los Angeles biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART. She has worked at various galleries and institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London; Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hosted by the Photography Department

 

BEVERLY FISHMAN & ELLIOTT EARLS
April 24, 6pm

Sabbatical Lecture: 
Beverly Fishman, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Painting department, and Elliott Earls, Designer-in-Residence and Head of 2D Design, will each deliver a presentation about their recent sabbaticals. Fishman will discuss living and working in New York, preparing for a solo exhibition and the motivations behind her recent body of work, which explore our contemporary global condition in which drugs construct and contest our identities and in which the production and consumption of art can seem like an addiction. Earls will discuss how disaster capitalism, day-trading strategies, YouTube and Google Adwords can form the basis of an experimental design practice.

 

MARTIN FINIO
April 25, 6pm

Martin Finio is a 1988 graduate of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. A registered New York Architect since 1993, Finio spent nearly a decade at the office of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. His experience there included the Cranbrook Natatorium, the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, and the Hunter Science Center at the Emma Willard School. Since 1999, he has been partnered with his wife Taryn Christoff and taught both design and studio courses at Yale University, where he teaches and tests a design philosophy rooted in the integration of building performance and spatial clarity. He has been recognized by Esquire magazine as “one of America’s most promising young architects.”

Hosted by the Architecture Department and sponsored by the J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund

 

CAMILLE ANN BREWER
May 1, 6pm

Camille Ann Brewer is The Textile Museum’s first full-time curator of contemporary textile art.
Previously she served as executive director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, a membership organization of libraries, universities and archives dedicated to making accessible materials that document the African-American and African diaspora. Ms. Brewer formerly served as an assistant curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts and as an art consultant and curator for her own company, CAB Fine Art, building collections and organizing exhibitions for public museums, corporations, and private collectors.  

Hosted by the Fiber Department