#Cranbook Academy of Art

[walkingdetroit]

Art in the Stations: Bricktown

I first discovered the Art in the Stations brochure at the Bricktown Station on January 24th, which was total happenstance on a rainy morning while I was out sipping my coffee.

Overlooking the Wayne County Building and the Downtown Detroit skyline, the Bricktown station has beautiful views, even on a foggy day.

As you walk down the stairs at the station, look to your left to see "Beaubien Passage" by Glen Michaels. Red and yellow ribbons add a pop of color to celebrate movement, intertwining over white porcelain panels. To create the piece, Michaels started with a sketch, and later hand-painted the red and yellow ribbons.

Glen Michaels attended Cranbook Academy of Art and lived in Birmingham most of his adult life. Inspired by the nature of the Pacific Midwest as well as Japan, he spent a few weeks at a Zen temple in 1960.

[banffcentrelibraryandarchives]

Artists’ Book Collection for the week of July 16th, 2018

[wazafam]

By BY HILARIE M. SHEETS from Arts in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/arts/design/michigan-cranbook-art.html?partner=IFTTT The Cranbrook Academy of Art’s history is about to be captured by a new exhibition emphasizing the school’s interdisciplinary spirit and its many untold stories. A Utopian Art School in Michigan Looks Back and Ahead New York Times

[designkiji]

キャサリン・マッコイ（Katherine McCoy）は、いくつかのデザイン会社でデザイナーとしてのキャリアを築いた後に、クランブルック・アカデミー・オブ・アート（Cranbook Academy of Art）で伝統にとらわれない...

[jarrettfuller]

On this week's episode of Scratching the Surface, my podcast about design criticism and practice, I have a great conversation with the designer, artist, and educator Elliott Earls. Since 2001, Elliott has been the artist-in-residence and head of the graduate graphic design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. At Cranbook, Elliott leads an innovative and tight-knit program full of students interested in pushing the boundaries of graphic design and blurring the lines between life and work.

In addition to the often radical aesthetics that emerge from its sleepy campus outside Detroit, Cranbrook's design program is perhaps most known for their interesting critique method. In place of the traditional pin-your-work-on-the-wall-group-crit, at Cranbrook, critiques span days, students write lengthy responses to the work in question, leading a discussion of the work while the creator remains silent, only offering their own perspective after everyone else has spoken. Elliott talks about many of the methods he uses in his own work, and with his students, in Studio Practice, his YouTube channel he bills as "your no-bullshit resource for the questions animating the designer and artist's studio." While I had known about Elliott's work for years, it was Studio Practice that gave me an inside look into how he thinks and works. These videos have influenced and inspired work in countless ways over the last few years.

In this episode, Elliott and I talk about his background and his discomfort with traditional design practice, what drew him to Cranbrook, his work in performance art, and how he makes his Studio Practice videos. But the part of the conversation that really inspired me, the part I got most excited about, is when we talk about something I've been thinking about a lot since I started the podcast: style. A topic that comes up again and again in my conversation with people is how styles and aesthetics derived from theoretical positions inevitably are borrowed, pinned, shared, and faved, ever-so-slowly removing them from context and theory and turning them into superficial visual tropes. Elliott has no patience for what he calls the 'children' but nothing but respect for the 'fathers and mothers', an idea he talks about at length in one of my favorite episodes of Studio Practice, Against the Global Influence of Dutch Graphic Design:

Elliott argues that by blindly aping style, by intentionally trying to make your work look like Dutch designers, you're writing yourself out of design history, you're immediately setting yourself below these others instead of finding new visual forms.

We also talk about the relationship between theory and practice, the books that have inspired him, and how talking about his work — with students, at lectures, on YouTube — influences his own art process. I have a lot of respect for Elliott and just love what he's doing — I think his approach to his work and his teaching is a model we can learn a lot from. I hope you enjoy it.

You can listen to the episode here, or on iTunes and Soundcloud. If you like it, consider rating it on iTunes?

[rhaxmys]

Old School - 20/10/17

What a project! I think I speak for most of the other students when I say that it was intense to say the least. We were challanged to do twenty-one individual tasks - including stitching together books, embossing paper, constructing letters; and even (depending on whether you were an illustrator or graphic designer) copying already created artworks with extreme accuracy. All within two weeks! The purpose of the project was to develop skills in presentation of work (which included preservation of work) and the making of things that could set us aside from other artists these days. The tasks given and mediums used could be described as outdated and obselete but that was the point, if not given away by the title of the project - to make us aware that doing things digitally is great, but not the be all and end all. Sometimes for the effects and themes you are trying to achieve, a manual process is required or more applicable. However, this is not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about the work of one ‘old school’ designer and compare them (and their work) to another, more modern designer. These two designers have been left up to us to choose, and my choices were Russian contructivist Alexander Rodchenko and New York based Austrian Stefan Sagmeister.

Alexander Rodchenko (1891 - 1956) worked with graphic design, and is known for designing propaganda during the Russian revolution before turning to photomontage and painting in later life. In fact, a lot of 20th century graphic design is inspired by much of his earlier work. Russian constructivist propaganda from the revolution fascinating, and Rodchenko is no exception. The design would have been done on a harshly constricted budget, rationed materials at best, and with next to no time for production, and it shows today - a lot of the examples of his work and other works from the same era have completely disintegrated or are almost completely degraded. Moreover, the work would have all been done originally and by hand. The typestting would have been manually done so, and the imagery would have been photographs or cut out of whatever magazines they would be able ot get a hold of. Even the paper would have been cheap, and extremely thin (which is why mostly they have not lasted at all). Nevertheless, the work was outstandingly influential with the tide of the revolution and generations after.

This influence might also be to do with how the work was designed - a lot of black and white to show defiance and oppertuinity for improvement, with striking notions of bright colour (particularly red, blue and green) to further encourage these themes. Not only this, but the type of language used was influential by itself - perhaps one of his most influential and known works features a woman calling with the text “КНИГИ [ЛЕНГИЗ] ПО ВСЕМ ОТРАСЛЯМ ЗНАНИЯ,” which translates to Books! (Please) in All Branches of Knowledge. Obviously it could be phrased better, and perhaps it could be more literally powerful if better language was used. But I like to think that because of the poor and borderline desperate conditions, the fact they took the time, effort, and resources to create something that gives such a message has more power than any words they could use. And quite frankly, these sorts of messages put together in flyers and posters at that time gave them so much power that it obviously did not Russia in the same way after the revolution (and Rodchenko’s death). In fact, his work went beyond its purpose and stuck the interest of many designers succeeding him: for their 2005 album You Could Have It So Much Better cover, the alternative band Franz Ferdinand were heavily influenced by the Branches of Knowledge poster, featuring a girl in the same pose but screaming Franz Ferdinand rather than the original message. But still, designers dilute and mix.

Stacking up against Rodchenko and others from the Russian revolution is a tall order, but Stefan Sagmeister may be up to the challenge. Born in Bregenz, Austria in 1962, he has lived long enough to work both manually and digitally, but in more recent works will combine the two and usually end up with a digital result. He co-founded a design firm with Jessica Walsh in 2010, and along with other designers have worked for clients such as Snapchat, BMW, 7Up, Pepsi, and even RedBull. In fact, Sagmeister & Walsh have worked for so many clients in a variety of media that they are reknowned as being some of the best graphic designers in the world. Sagmeister himself generally takes sabaticals and breaks every seven years but nothing keeps him out of the line of the design industry for long. Obviously, Sagmeister is far from being in the same position as Rodchenko. His work is technically speaking infinitely more advanced, taking advantage the rise of the digital age, along with processes that would look alien to Rodchenko. Not only this, but because of his status and profit from his (and other) works, he does not have any issue with buying and using the best materials money can buy, time and time again if necessary. This suggests that Sagemeister’s work has a completely different meaning to that of Rodchenko’s, or at the very least, does not have the same level of desperation, nor a feeling of trying to change the world. Having said that, they are not entirely different.

For one thing, Sagmeister is known for creating work that is certainly left-field, and going the extra mile. In 1999, he designed a poster for a lecture for AIGA-Detroit & Cranbook Academy of Art: and all of the details of the event (ticket prices, location, time, even the sponsers of the event) were scratched into his body by his assistant and left to scar and show the information. For one thing, I think this is one of the most outlandish and insane things ever done in graphic design history, but Sagmeister does not suprise me in achieving this. Furthermore, it would have hurt surely to just write his name, but literally all of the information from a traditional exhibition was cut into him, spanning from just under his collar bones to just above his crotch, at least two feet of his body. Sagmeister has often been questioned on his approach and design of the poster since, and his response is seemingly “If you want to be original, you must be able to take the pain.” Despite English not being his first language, he manages to find the most succinct and flawless words to use in his work. Furthermore, despite his calculated and consdiered use of langauge being the exact opposite of the desperate, rushed messages from Russian constructivism, they have something quite interesting in common: the wanting to change the world. And, as it stands, both designers seemingly have done so in their own way.

Comparing Rodchenko and Sagmeister is difficult in some respects, given their different pathway into design, surrounding circumstances, and influences of their time - in fact, Rodchenko may well have influenced Sagmeister. But as mentioned, their desire to stop people in their thoughts and their tracks is palpable and identical. The only differences are from the lives they have lived, and peroidical influences. This does not mean however that you could swap the two and put them in each other’s cicrumstances and expect equally as iconic outcomes, but you can bet that such a happenstance would be interesting to explore. Regardless, no matter the level of technology, or language, or even how potentially threatening the subject matter is, I firmly believe you can draw similarities between two graphic designers from anywhere - their work will stand out and shine above others. It will be stunning and striking and give them all of the credit that they deserve. Two designers we can say this is clearly true for are Alexander Rodchenko and Stefan Sagmeister.

Either way, what a project!

- Max.

[theinsidioussketcher-blog]

Designer Essay - Ed Fella

Ed Fella is a graduate of the MFA program at Cranbook Academy of art, and is known for his various contributions to the world of design. Ed Fella has impacted the field, working in it for over 20 years. He is known as the artist to introduce a new era and generation of graphic designers.

Coming from a humble beginning in Detroit, Ed went in to study illustration in his early college career, then went to work for a design firm, using his lettering and illustration prowess and improving his craft. He then went on to fo commerical work for healthcare clients and automobile Advertising. 

He specialized in expiremental personal work, often using phot collages to emphasize his interest in type movement and visual variety. before Adobe introduced the ability to alter type, Ed Fella found a way to Kern individual type. By doing this, he was already a decade ahead of his time.

The growing art scene in the late 1970s and 80s allowed Ed Fella to expand his tastes and his influence. He designed catalog and posters for nonprofit shows like the Detroit Focus Gallery. 

Being a designer of unique taste and great talent, Ed Fella is an example of how crestive persistence can help with accomplishing any goal, so as long a there is great focus involved. Given what he has introduced to the design world, his contributions have allowed for other artists to see his work and be inspired as well. Ed fella is an example of an artist who greatly appreciates his work and has a sense of passion that is uncommon in the art world. With his unique approach to the design of typography and his unconventional way of thinking, he has revolutionized the design world - and that is why he is earned his place in the list of AIGA medalists.

[jodell11]

Florence Knoll Bassett: Florence was born to a baker and orphaned at the age of 12. Florence grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and showed an early interest in architecture and was enrolled at the kings wood school for girls, which was adjacent to the cranbook Academy of Art. She later moved to Cranbook and through different connections developed and made new skills were the foundations of Florence schusts incredible design education and pioneering career. In 1941 Florence moved to New York and met up withHans Knoll who was establishing his furniture company. With Florences skills in designing and Hans skills in business, the pair who later married in 1946, grew the company into an international arbiter of style and design. Florence Knoll defined the standard for the modern corporate interiors of post-war America. As part of her work on the planning unit, she continued to add to her furniture catalogue and designs. She humbly referred to her furniture designs as the 'meat and the potatoes' among the stand out prices from other designers such as Bertoia. What I like about Florence Knolls designs are the shape and curves in her furniture, and I feel as this really suits the human form well and causes a calm and free flowing interaction to take place whilst in use. I think this because of the material it's made out of and the comfort side of things which would attract a calm interaction to take place. What I would like to develop form this would be to manipulate the form of the furniture changing the shape and making it look uncomfortable and not appealing and seeing what people would be attracted to it and the interactions which would take place as a part of it.

[caveartfair]

10 Mid-Century Designers Who Are Not Charles and Ray Eames

From the art market to haute-couture runways to interior design, trends come and go by the season. Yet mid-century modernism, the global design movement that took hold from the 1940s through the ’60s, continues to resonate. Resurging in popularity in the late ’90s—when well-to-do urbanites shed their then-favored thrift-shop aesthetic for the sleek, futuristic designs of decades past—mid-century modernism was given another boost in recent years by the television show Mad Men, set in the 1960s, and its celebrated period-accurate interiors.

Like their European peers, mid-century designers across the U.S. broke with tradition to create avant-garde furnishings, interiors, and graphic arts that championed clean lines, streamlined forms, and distinct juxtapositions of material. The designer and writer George Nelson recognized three stylistic strands of the movement: “biomorphic,” which described organic forms and curved lines; “machine,” whose stark, fluid aesthetic had its origins in Bauhaus philosophy; and “handmade,” which encapsulated the functional and simple crafting of wood.

It was also an era in which mass production brought the newest designs into the average home, summarized by the mantra of legendary West Coast design duo Charles and Ray Eames: “getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least amount of money.” Below, we shine a light on 10 American modernists who made innovative and enduring designs for the home interior—from Isamu Noguchi’s understated wood-and-glass coffee table to Alexander Girard’s whimsical, folk-inspired textiles.

George Nelson

Irving Harper (American, 20th century). "Ball" Wall Clock, 1948-1969. Painted birch, steel, brass, 13 1/2 x 13 1/2 x 2 3/4 in. (34.3 x 34.3 x 7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, H. Randolph Lever Fund, 2000.101.1

Coconut Lounge Chair and Ottoman, ca. 1960. George Nelson Hildebrandt Studio

Nelson’s prolific career straddled journalism, theory, and practice. As a young Yale graduate, he toured Europe and interviewed the leading architects of the time—including Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius—for articles in Pencil Points magazine. Later, as an influential editor of Architectural Forum, he heralded and fiercely defended the modernist design principles of the day. “The fact is that the modern world is constantly being designed and redesigned,” he once wrote, “not by these over-publicized specialists, but by literally millions of people, most of whom do not think of themselves as designers, but who nonetheless are primarily responsible for the shape of the world.” From 1947 to 1972, as design director for the Herman Miller furniture company, Nelson conceived the coconut chair and the ball clock, among other iconic fixtures.

Florence Knoll

Florence Knoll, 3 Stools, ca 1950. Courtesy of Patrick Parrish Gallery.

Knoll endorsed the then-revolutionary philosophy of “total design”: the idea that the entirety of a space, from its architecture to its interior design to its textiles, should be integrated. After studying architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art under Eliel Saarinen, Knoll went on to train with some of the leading figures of the day, including Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer. In 1946, she established her own company, Knoll, with her husband Hans; the duo would become the international authority on contemporary design and taste. Beyond her own innovative, Bauhaus-inspired designs, Knoll also had a knack for nurturing talent and recruiting her friends to contribute; Bertoia’s wire furniture and Eero Saarinen’s “Tulip” pieces were but two of the many iconic collections offered by Knoll under her direction.

Isamu Noguchi

Akari 25N, 1968. Isamu Noguchi Noguchi Museum

Coffee Table (IN-50), 1944. Isamu Noguchi Noguchi Museum

Across sculpture, ceramics, and design, the Japanese-American artist Noguchi refused to be classified. “It has often been pointed out to me that when I have achieved a certain success of style, then I abandon it,” he wrote in his 1968 autobiography, A Sculptor’s World. “There is no doubt a distrust on my part for style and for the success that accrues from it.” Noguchi created furniture designs and interiors in the same biomorphic forms as his sculpture, working with materials as diverse as wood, stone, metal, clay, and paper. Introduced in 1947, his “Noguchi Coffee Table” consists of a glass surface and a base constructed from two elegantly interlocking pieces of wood. Living in Japan after World War II, Noguchi was inspired by the sight of lanterns illuminating night fishers on the river, and made his first paper and bamboo “akari” light sculptures.

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia, Diamond Chair, ca. 1960. Courtesy of Open Air Modern, Brooklyn.

Italian-born furniture and jewelry designer Bertoia made significant—yet under-recognized—contributions to the famous “Eames chair” while working for Charles and Ray. Frustrated, he left California for Pennsylvania in 1950 to work for Florence Knoll (who he had met a decade earlier at Cranbook Academy of Art) and her husband Hans. Entrusted by the Knollses with the freedom to design whatever he pleased, he debuted his now-iconic wire furniture collection, featuring his airy, steel-framed “Diamond Chair,” in 1952. “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture,” he said of his design. “Space passes right through them.”

George Nakashima

Pair of Conoid Cushion Chairs , . George Nakashima Moderne Gallery

Desk with Mira Chair, ca. 1958. George Nakashima Lillian Nassau LLC

Following his release from a World War II Japanese internment camp in the U.S., where he had built furniture with a carpenter who had trained in Japan, Nakashima established his own studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The woodworker, who grew up in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and trained in architecture at MIT, honored the natural beauty of wood in his handcrafted designs, aiming to give trees a “second life” as objects of furniture. “There’s too much conscious effort toward art, and not enough effort toward a way of life,” Nakashima said in 1961. “Consider, for instance, the way nature produces a tree. The roots, the branches all grow in a certain way because they have a reason for growing that way.”

Greta Magnusson Grossman

"Cobra" lamp, 1948. Greta Magnusson Grossman R & Company

"Grasshopper" floor lamp, 1947-1948. Greta Magnusson Grossman Phillips: Design

Fusing traditional Scandinavian design with Southern California modernism, Swedish-born designer and architect Grossman immigrated to the U.S. in 1940 and opened a shop on Rodeo Drive, where she attracted celebrity clients. Throughout her four-decade-long career, she became known for her distinctly compact furniture designs that elegantly juxtaposed materials, such as California walnut, black plastic laminate, and wrought iron. One of her most memorable contributions was a line of lamps in the late 1940s, including the Cobra Lamp and the Grasshopper Lamp, which were among the first to include bullet-shaped shades. In the 1950s, Grossman also devised several open-plan homes—small scale, like her furniture designs—in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sweden. At least 10 of them are still standing.

Milo Baughman

Olive Burl Sofa, ca. 1970. Milo Baughman Patrick Parrish Gallery

Baughman’s career was determined at the young age of 13, when he drafted interior and exterior plans for his family home in Long Beach, California. Stylish yet unpretentious, his designs incorporated quintessentially mid-century materials like stainless steel, chrome, leather, and glass with a relaxed Californian aesthetic, as well as creative applications of upholstery. Like Wormley, Baughman never sacrificed functionality and was opposed to designs that purposefully drew attention. “Furniture that is too obviously designed is very interesting, but too often belongs only in museums,” he once said. His work was relatively affordable, too. As described by the New York Times in 1966, “Mr. Baughman and the companies he works for...are among the few mass producers putting out inventive, nontraditional furniture that is widely available to the public both in terms of price and retail outlet.”

Alexander Girard

Occasional Table, 1967. Alexander Girard Patrick Parrish Gallery

LAR Shell Chair, 1955. Charles and Ray Eames and Alexander Girard Patrick Parrish Gallery

Though the worldly, New York-born designer Girard created furniture, exhibitions, and interiors, he is primarily recognized for his contributions to modern textile design. As the head of Herman Miller’s textile division from the 1950s to the ’70s, Girard combined vibrant colors and bold, playful patterns in prints that invigorated the minimalist designs of his contemporaries. Girard was often inspired by textiles collected from his travels around the world, particularly those from places with strong folk art traditions like Mexico, India, and the southwestern U.S. In 1961, Girard and Miller opened the pioneering (though unprofitable) Textiles & Objects store in New York, where Girard displayed his foreign wares alongside Herman Miller furniture and his own textiles.

Edward Wormley

Pair of Rare "Modern Morris Chairs", 1940's. Edward Wormley Lobel Modern

Rare Sideboard, c. 1952. Edward Wormley Donzella 20th Century Gallery

To the Chicago-born, New York-based designer Wormley, modernism meant “freedom—freedom to mix, to choose, to change, to embrace the new but to hold fast to what is good.” From the 1940s to the ’60s, his subdued, elegant designs for the Dunbar Furniture Corporation presented a more conservative, yet nonetheless original, alternative to the avant-garde designs of the time. Wormley preferred craft features, as in the woven-wood facade of his 1956 Model 5666 sideboard, and often reinterpreted historical European models. His unique combination of traditional and new forms made modern design more accessible to the average American family.

Karl Springer

"Pergamon Credenza" in Burgundy Embossed Lizard Leather, ca. 1980. Karl Springer Lobel Modern

Born in Berlin, Springer arrived in New York in 1957 aspiring to work as a bookbinder. At department store Lord & Taylor, and later Bergdorf Goodman, he practiced a meticulous craftsmanship, covering books, collectables, and decorative desk items with leathers, skins, and other fine materials. He soon drew loyal and glamorous clientele, including the Duchess of Windsor. In the mid-’60s, he established his own design studio and expanded his practice to furniture. Springer became known for combining rich, diverse materials and styles—from Art Deco to classical Chinese to Bauhaus—and is considered to have driven the resurgence in popularity of shagreen, an Asian sharkskin material. “Once I was discovered by the Duchess and her circle, I probably could have gone on making little leather phone tables forever,” he recounted in a 1989 interview. “But you need a challenge.”

—Demie Kim

from Artsy News