Detroit Area Art Deco Society and a2modern
join forces to offer a tour of the
Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America and
Anders Ruhwald at Saarinen House: The Anatomy of a Home
The tour will start with the Anders Ruhwald exhibit located within the Eliel Saarinen House on the campus of Cranbrook Art Academy. Following the tour of Anders Ruhwald at Saarinen House: The Anatomy of a Home, the group will visit Cranbrook Art Museum for the tour of the Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America exhibit.
The cost for both tours is $22. This event has limited space available. Registration and payment for the event must be received by September 11th.
Location: Cranbrook Art Museum 39221 Woodward Avenue Bloomfield Hills, MI
Click HERE to purchase tickets.
Descriptions of both exhibits from the Cranbrook Art Museum:
In Michigan, industry and design intertwined creating an epicenter of modern design. Michigan's visionaries touched nearly every aspect of American life. Detroit's automobile manufacturers didn't just produce automobiles; they styled them to become synonymous with the American dream. The state's furniture manufacturers didn't just manufacture furniture; they revolutionized the look of the American office and home. Michigan architects Albert Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki didn't just design buildings; they defined an era.
Michigan's industry, prosperity, and educational institutions created a synergy that attracted the design talent that formed the foundation for modern American design. This exhibition celebrates Michigan's outstanding contributions to Modern design and the stories of the people who made it happen.
Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America is organized by the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office in association with Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by MPdL Studio.
Anders Ruhwald
For his first solo exhibition in Michigan, Danish ceramist Anders Ruhwald will present a series of “site-sensitive” installations in Saarinen House, the “total work of art” designed by the Finnish American architect Eliel Saarinen in 1930. Saarinen House, which Cranbrook Art Museum operates as a historic house museum, will provide the ideal backdrop for Ruhwald's continued investigations into the nature of Modernism-specifically Scandinavian Modernism-and will serve to heighten the dialogue that his work promotes within the overlapping fields of art, craft, and design. Ruhwald serves as an Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Although Ruhwald has presented other site-sensitive installations in Europe, his interventions into the domestic spaces of Saarinen House, from the iconic dining room to the private rear courtyard, will allow the artist to fully explore Modernism's construction of the everyday, and what happens to that ideal when it is frozen in time in the fictive environment of a house museum. The exhibition will only be accessible through Cranbrook's campus tour program, which necessarily means the experience will be mediated by an Art Museum staff member or a volunteer docent-further underlining the tension between the reconstructed historic environment and Ruhwald's intervention.
The installation will also explore the interpersonal relationships of the Saarinen family, including the father-son dynamic of Eliel and Eero and the link between the two provided by the work of Alvar Aalto.
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