Cranbrook Academy of Art Announces Its 2018 [FALL] Lecture Series

Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Sept. 26, 2018 – The public lecture series at Cranbrook Academy of Art is a critical and idiosyncratic look into the conversations and inquiry that drive the Academy’s 11 departments of art, architecture and design. The Academy’s open structure allows for a responsive approach to curating its lecture series so that the conversations on campus are timely and reflect urgent issues in each respective field. The Academy’s open pedagogy means between 30 and 50 visiting artists, designers, curators and thinkers are bringing their research to the Academy’s studios and impacting the practices of its community.

All lectures are open to the public and held in Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium. Admission is free. Additional lectures may be added. Visit our website for the most up-to-date schedule.

September 28, 5:30pm David Crabb
David Crabb is a 1999 graduate of the Academy’s Photography department, and is currently a Los Angeles-based author, performer, storyteller and host of The Moth. In 2013, his solo show Bad Kid was named a New York Times critic’s pick. Bad Kid, the memoir, was released in 2015 by Harper Perennial. David has taught storytelling at Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, Occidental College, Indiana University and NYU. Since 2012, he has performed the solo pieces Bad Kid, $1800, Story Roulette, and Man in a Hole.
Sponsored by the Niels Diffrient Professional Development Fund

October 4, 6pm Leon Ransmeier
Leon Ransmeier is an American industrial designer. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he founded his New York based studio Ransmeier Inc in 2010. He has designed products for clients including Arita 2016/, HAY, Herman Miller, Maharam and Mattiazzi. Ransmeier’s collaboration with industry often creates subtle interventions into the way we perceive and use things.
Sponsored by the 3D Design department

October 10, 4pm Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her practice traverses the boundaries of fine art, design, and public engagement. She is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Sponsored by the 2D Design department

October 18, 6pm Mariah Garnet
Mariah Garnett mixes documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. She has received numerous awards and held solo exhibitions around the world.
Sponsored by the Photography department

October 20, 4pm Ridley Howard
In paintings ranging from jewel-like to large-scale, abstract to figurative, Ridley Howard explores the nuances of color, shape, and composition with exquisite sensitivity. All of his works—whether precisely composed geometric abstractions, land- and cityscapes, portraits of individuals, or scenes of couples making love—are, at their core, color studies. Howard strips his subjects down, forgoing narrative and visual details, transforming them into pristine, velvety planes of pigment and collections of shapes.
Sponsored by the Painting department

October 25, 2pm Tom LaDuke
Tom LaDuke deploys meticulous and labor-intensive processes in the creation of his paintings and hyper-realistic sculptures. His recent paintings involve the application of four distinct layers of paint to the canvas: the first three are delicately applied with an airbrush to depict the screen of a TV that captures scenes of his studio as reflected in the glass, as well as glimpses of films playing on the screen. The fourth layer is a jarring, thick, and apparently haphazard application of oil paint that produces the effect of two separate paintings colliding on the same canvas. Using delicate materials, his sculptures painstakingly replicate objects, as seen in Flemish Veil (2010) where LaDuke recreates the cracks in a Dutch painting using eyelashes and arm hair.
Sponsored by the Sculpture department

October 30 6pm John Corso Esquivel
“Matrixial Shadows in Gego’s Reticulárea”
John Corso is the 2018-19 Critical Studies and Humanities Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is a tenured associate professor of art history at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., where he is finishing a term as Doris and Paul Travis professor. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art and Archaeology from Cornell University, master’s degrees in art history from Cornell and Tufts, a Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, and a bachelor’s degree in art from Williams College.
Sponsored by the Critical Studies and Humanities Program

November 10, 4pm Lucy Kim
Lucy Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised between South Korea, Myanmar, and the United States. Recent exhibitions were held at the ICA Boston, Institute of Fine Arts- NYU, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Lisa Cooley among others. She is the recipient of the ICA Foster Prize, Artadia Award, MacDowell Fellowship, and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship, and is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Boston University. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art.
Sponsored by the Painting department

November 13, 6pm Melissa Hillard Potter
“Pulp Feminism: Interdisciplinary Fiber Works”
Raised among multiple generations of crafters, artists and feminists, Potter’s interdisciplinary practice considers women’s handicraft and social customs as a distinct language and history. Through socially engaged practice, she explores marginalized, and in some cases, endangered craft forms as contemporary media with social, political and artistic potential. This lecture will focus on her long-term engagement in papermaking, as well as other materials and methods to build new narratives.
Sponsored by the Fiber department

November 15, 6pm Daniel Bozhkov
The work of Daniel Bozhkov involves acts of resistance to institutionalized homogenization, aiming to be more infectious than disruptive. He uses a variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, and often works with professionals from different fields to activate public space. His projects are embedded in the worlds of genetic science, department mega-stores and world-famous tourist sites, where he enters as an intruder/visitor who produces new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems. As a collaborator with reality, he tries to set in motion a process of accelerated archeology that is faster than the institutions’ built-in obsolescence.
Sponsored by the Print Media department

November 16, 5pm Valerie Cassel Oliver
Valerie Cassel Oliver is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Previously she was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) in Texas. Cassel’s work is often focused on representation, inclusivity and highlighting artists of different social and cultural backgrounds. She is the curator of Cranbrook Art Museum’s fall exhibition, Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, which she will discuss.
Sponsored by Cranbrook Art Museum

November 29, 6pm Brittany Nelson
Brittany Nelson works with 19th century photographic chemistry techniques to address themes of feminist science fiction and queer abstraction. She is a 2011 graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Photography department. She is the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Grant in Visual Arts and a Theo Westenberger Foundation Grant for advancing women in the arts. She has hosted exhibitions around the world and been published extensively.
Sponsored by the Photography department

December 4, 6pm Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson is professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Berkeley Arts Research Center. Her talk will investigate Bruce Nauman’s persistent performance of anxious masculinity from a feminist and queer perspective. What might be at stake in Nauman’s fantasies and how might we envision his work as offering new– if fraught– models of inter-subjective, porous embodiment?
Sponsored by the Fiber department

Media Contact:
Julie Fracker
Director of Communications
Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum
248.645.3329
jfracker@cranbrook.edu