Cranbrook Academy of Art Announces Spring 2025 Lecture Series
Clockwise from upper left: Porchia Moore, Folayemi Wilson (Photo: Nathan Keay), Phong Bui (Photo: Nicola Delorme), Elena Kanagy-Loux (Photo by Rose Callahan), Mike Cloud.
Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Jan. 9, 2025 — Cranbrook Academy of Art announces its Spring 2025 public lecture series, which brings together an innovative group of artists, writers, and designers.
The visiting artist lecture series will encourage us to think expansively about the role of creativity in building community and in shaping the world around us. Each visiting artist will spend time on campus, conducting studio visits, visiting departments, and sharing insights into their creative practice.
All lectures are free and open to the public in Cranbrook’s deSalle Auditorium. Lectures that are recorded will be available on Cranbrook’s deSalle Auditorium YouTube channel. For more information about each speaker, and to keep up with new speakers as they are added, visit our website.
January 16, 2025, 6pm
Phong Bui
An artist, writer, independent curator, Bui also serves as co-founder/publisher/artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer.
January 28, 2025, 6pm*
Elena Kanagy-Loux
Elena Kanagy-Loux, a descendant of the Amish who grew up between the US and Japan, earned her BFA in Textile Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology before embarking on a study of European lacemaking in 2015. She co-founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild, taught bobbin lace classes, completed an MA in Costume Studies at NYU, and spent five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center. Now pursuing a Ph.D. at Bard Graduate Center, her work focuses on the global expansion of lacemaking. In her presentation, she will share insights from her international studies, commissioned projects, and current research.
*Note: This lecture will be held on a Tuesday, when Cranbrook Art Museum is closed. Please enter through the Cranbrook Academy of Art Library, located adjacent to Cranbrook Art Museum. Signage will be present.
February 27, 2025, 6pm
Porchia Moore
Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) and an Associate Professor and Rotating Program Head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. She also serves as Co-Director of the Incluseum, an international cultural heritage collaboratory. Her writing and research are widely used for training and education in museums across the United States.
March 27, 2025, 6pm
Mike Cloud
Cloud is a painter and serves as an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. His work examines paintings as objects within a broader cultural system of objects, marks, symbols, motifs, and forms, and his technique blurs and blends elements into aesthetic compositions that interrogate the politics, contrivances, and language of painting and the artist’s complicity in its system of functions.
April 10, 2025, 6pm
Folayemi Wilson
Wilson is an object and image-maker whose work celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. They will share their work and process of mining history as material in their creative practice, and recent explorations into found textiles and other means of manipulating cloth.
About Cranbrook Academy of Art
Cranbrook Academy of Art is one of the country’s top-ranked, graduate-only programs in architecture, design, and fine art. The focus at Cranbrook is on studio practice in one of 11 disciplines: Architecture, Ceramics, Fiber, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Metalsmithing, Painting, Photography, Print Media, and Sculpture. The program is anchored by celebrated Artists-in-Residence, who live and work on campus alongside our students. For more information, visit cranbrookart.edu.
Media Contact
Julie Fracker
Director of Communications
Cranbrook Academy of Art + Cranbrook Art Museum
248.645.3329
jfracker@cranbrook.edu
