Past Exhibitions

HUB 50th Exhibition
50 Years Strong: The Evolution of HUB at Cranbrook

April 25 through May 10, June 20 through August 30, and September 19 through November 29, 2015

Horizons-Upward Bound, known as HUB, has its roots in a partnership with Cranbrook Schools that began in 1965. Originally named Horizons, it was an experimental summer enrichment program to provide a private school experience on the Cranbrook campus for low-income boys from Detroit.  Funded by a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation, the first class consisted of 52 boys from three junior high schools in Detroit. The following year, Horizons incorporated the U.S. Department of Education's Upward Bound program and soon was renamed Horizons-Upward Bound.

Over the past fifty years, HUB has evolved into a year-round program which prepares both boys and girls with limited financial opportunities to enter and succeed in post-secondary education. This exhibition sheds light on the history of the program and its continued affiliation with Cranbrook Schools and highlights key individuals and events that have helped make it the successful legacy it is today including the program's directors Ben Snyder, Bill Washington, Eddie Green, and current director Darryl Taylor. Through news clippings, program invitations, brochures and newsletters, student publications, and historic photographs, the exhibition presents a chronological history of the multi-faceted academic enrichment program known as HUB.

50 Years Strong: The Evolution of HUB at Cranbrook was organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and curated by Head Archivist Leslie S. Edwards.  The Center, which includes Cranbrook Archives, is supported, in part, by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Towbes Foundation of Santa Barbara, California, and many generous individual donors. The exhibition is open during regular Museum hours and is included in admission.

For more information about HUB visit: http://schools.cranbrook.edu/Page/About-Us/Horizons-Upward-Bound/Welcome

 

Cranbrook Goes to the Movies:
Films and Their Objects, 1925-1975
ArtMembers' Opening Reception: Friday, June 20, 2014
Public Exhibition Dates: June 21, 2014 – November 30, 2014

Cranbrook and the camera grew up together. In the 1920s, as George and Ellen Booth were realizing their dream of a community dedicated to art, science, and education, amateur filmmaking flourished as a newly affordable hobby. These two historical trajectories—that of an educational community and of a medium that has shaped the cultural experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—intersect in Cranbrook Goes to the Movies.

The vintage films featured in this exhibition bring the diverse history of Cranbrook’s campus alive in a way never before experienced; through the actual people and objects that populated it. Archival film can feel distant, a relic of days past, and historic objects are too often divorced from their time period and their context. Cranbrook Goes to the Movies reunites the material with the ephemeral, giving physical presence to the vintage films that document life at Cranbrook and placing some of Cranbrook’s treasures in their historic context. An immersive experience, Cranbrook Goes to the Movies provides an avenue into Cranbrook’s past built not on dry text and static images but on the vitality and movements of the people who lived it.

Cranbrook Goes to the Movies: Films and Their Objects, 1925-1975 is organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and curated by the Center’s 2012-2014 Collections Fellow Shoshana Resnikoff. The Center, which includes Cranbrook Archives, is supported, in part, by the Towbes Foundation of Santa Barbara, California, and the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation.


Ephemera: Fragments from Cranbrook’s Social Life
Public Exhibition Dates: April 22, 2014 – September 28, 2014

​Often referred to as the transient evidence of everyday life, ephemera is primary source material that spans the entire range of printing and social history, offering direct evidence of our cultural, social, industrial, and technological histories. Because the Cranbrook Archives’ collection of ephemera is so rich and varied, this exhibition focuses on ephemera that illustrates Cranbrook’s social life during the 20th century.

Ranging from printed matter for theatrical productions, family and alumni reunions, and school athletic events, to lecture series and science and art museum exhibitions, these documents present a visually compelling story of the way in which the Cranbrook community has represented its preoccupations, cultural perceptions, and identity over the past century. This is the first of several exhibitions that will feature ephemera from the collections of the Cranbrook Archives.

Ephemera: Fragments that Document Cranbrook’s Social Life was organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and curated by Head Archivist Leslie S. Edwards. The Center, which includes Cranbrook Archives, is supported, in part, by the Towbes Foundation of Santa Barbara, California, and the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation.

 


"A Driving Force: Cranbrook and the Car"
Exhibition Dates: Friday, June 14, through Sunday, October 13, 2013

Detroit’s first V-8 engine, adjustable seats and steering wheels, the Ford Mustang: these automobile innovations may have been created in the Motor City, but they have something else in common—Cranbrook. "A Driving Force: Cranbrook and the Car" explores the way Cranbrook has played a role in shaping the landscape of American life through the automobile from the start of the twentieth century.

As early as 1913 James Scripps Booth, son of Cranbrook founders George and Ellen Booth, designed groundbreaking cars and motorcycles on Cranbrook’s campus. Twenty years later, Cranbrook Academy of Art educated young designers who brought innovation to the auto industry. Cranbrook students in this period included Eugene Bordinat, future chief designer and vice president at Ford Motor Company, and Suzanne Vanderbilt, whose work at GM went far beyond her role as one of Harley Earl’s “Damsels of Design.” From Packard design competitions to physiological research, from the legendary design of the Mustang to the forgotten treasure of the Pink Panther, Cranbrook’s reach extended far beyond its campus to help define that ultimate symbol of modern America: the automobile.


From the Archives: Teaching and Exhibiting Painting at Cranbrook, 1930-1970
Exhibition Dates: Friday, June 14, through Sunday, September 29, 2013

Cranbrook Academy of Art was instrumental in educating students and the general public alike about the techniques and aesthetics of painting not only through the Department of Painting’s graduate studio program, but also museum exhibitions and youth programs. This exhibition, which marks the debut of the “From the Archives” series, highlights archival materials that help tell the story of modern painting at Cranbrook.

Organized around six vignettes, the exhibition presents historic photographs, vintage exhibition announcements and catalogs, institutional press releases, and rarely-seen correspondence with museum professionals. These documents illustrate the ways in which the Academy shaped the aesthetics of hundreds of students and visitors, from the museum’s earliest exhibitions and its later curators to the role Cranbrook painters played in the New Deal arts programs in the 1930s and 1940s.

Teaching and Exhibiting Painting at Cranbrook, 1930-1970 was organized by the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and curated by Head Archivist Leslie S. Edwards. The Center, which includes Cranbrook Archives, is supported, in part, by its Charter Patrons, the Towbes Foundation of Santa Barbara, California, and the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation.