BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI.- Cranbrook Art Museum announced the forthcoming release of With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932, a singular exploration of the storied institution as a radical experiment in the education of artists, and survey of the artists who studied and taught there. Available February 2021, the 624-plus-page hardcover book accompanies an exhibition of the same name, on view at the museum from June 18–September 19, 2021.

Although schools of art and design emerged in the twentieth century — places such as the Bauhaus or Black Mountain College — only Cranbrook Academy of Art remains today as a vital force in the worlds of art, architecture, craft, and design. Widely considered the cradle of mid-century modernism in America, the Academy not only pioneered a more organic and human-centric approach to design starting in the 1930s, it also helped shape the Studio Craft movement in America in the postwar period, and radicalized the fields of architecture and design in the 1980s during the advent of postmodernism.

“While Cranbrook Academy of Art is rightfully associated with stellar names like Charles and Ray Eames and Florence Knoll, the radical nature of its educational approach centered students as artists by putting them in charge of their own learning journey. There would be no classes, only a studio to work in; no grades, only critiques by your peers; and no real boundaries between art, design, and craft,” says Andrew Blauvelt, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum, who authored the book and curated the exhibition. “Saarinen created an artistic utopia that endures today because he did not want to make an art school, but rather he thought of the Academy as an incubator of individual talents working individually and collectively in a giant laboratory of experimentation.”

Representing the various programs of study at the school, the With Eyes Opened publication features 200 artists associated with the Academy across nearly 90 years — both historical figures and emerging voices — who have made remarkable contributions to the visual arts. The accompanying exhibition will feature more than 250 works — including architecture, ceramics, design, fiber, metalwork, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture — and will occupy all of the museum’s galleries, the largest such examination of the Academy since the landmark 1983 exhibition, Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision, 1925-1950.

“Cranbrook is like no other institution in the United States. It is part artists’ colony, part school, part museum and part design laboratory, and it has never allowed its students to be bound by the narrow lines separating the various design disciplines.” — Paul Goldberger, The New York Times