BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.- This month, Cranbrook Art Museum welcomes three new exhibitions to its galleries, including two focused on the emerging and established talent from Detroit’s creative community.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I is the inaugural exhibition of Cranbrook’s newest collection devoted to celebrating and preserving the work of Detroit-based artists and designers. Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin presents a new body of work from Detroit-based artist Neha Vedpathak alongside works by American painter Agnes Martin.

The exhibitions join the acclaimed Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, the first nationally touring retrospective of Takakazu’s work in 20 years, which opened to the public earlier this month.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I
October 26, 2024–March 2, 2025

In 2016, Cranbrook Art Museum inaugurated a new permanent collection devoted to celebrating and preserving the work of artists and designers in the metro Detroit area—its first new collection in decades. How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I is the first exhibition to showcase works that have recently been acquired by generous gifts, museum purchases, and commissions.

The exhibition features the work of over 30 artists and designers who have called Detroit home including established artists such as Ed Fraga, Brenda Goodman, Carole Harris, Scott Hocking, Lester Johnson, Charles McGee, Gordon Newton, and Gilda Snowden, as well as fresh talents including Nour Ballout, Allana Clarke, Jack Craig, Bakpak Durden, James Benjamin Franklin, Joshua Rainer, Rashaun Rucker, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell among many others.

“The Detroit Collection represents a major institutional initiative to collect, interpret, and present the work of the city’s artistic community,” said Andrew Blauvelt, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum.

“This is the first public debut of this collection which will grow more over time. We plan to create other exhibitions from this collection, which contains hundreds of works, in the coming years,” said Kat Goffnett, the Art Museum’s Associate Curator of Collections.

Blauvelt continues, “It is important for institutions such as Cranbrook Art Museum to be an integral partner working with artists, galleries, museums, and other non-profits to help create a rich and diverse artistic eco-system for Detroit—and as such we endeavor to support artists through the Detroit Collection.”

The Detroit Collection is designed to acknowledge the long-standing history of artists who have called Detroit home and the area’s rich and diverse community of practitioners. It is particularly focused on art from the 1960s to the present in a variety of media.

How We Make the Planet Move takes its title from a poem by Detroit-born poet, jessica Care moore, A Poem Saved My Life: An Homage to Detroit. The exhibition will be open from October 26, 2024 to March 2, 2025.

Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin
October 26, 2024–March 2, 2025

The exhibition Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin features a new body of work by Detroit-based artist Neha Vedpathak alongside important pieces by Agnes Martin, the great American painter often associated with Minimalism. Martin has been a principal influence on Vedpathak’s practice.

On view in the exhibition are two paintings by Martin that exemplify her prolific and lifelong exploration of the grid, featuring her trademark muted colors created with a gentle, concentrated hand. They are displayed alongside a new body of work by Vedpathak featuring her unique technique of manipulating paper that she calls “plucking.”

Just as Martin often rejected the label of Minimalism and considered herself an Abstract Expressionist, Vedpathak considers her own work as “subtleist.” The name of the exhibition—Subtleism—pushes back on such art historical categorizations, while allowing a contemporary artist to see Martin’s work through a different lens.

“Neha Vedpathak’s practice is unique in that her plucking technique is of her own invention, however her references are deeply embodied in the history of art and making,” said Laura Mott, Chief Curator at Cranbrook Art Museum. “When she told me of her research into Agnes Martin, it felt important to link these artists across generations through their work. Martin’s work is so iconic in art history, and yet next to Vedpathak’s newly created reverential works, Martin’s work feels freshly vibrant in the present.”

This is the third exhibition in Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint series, which highlights a new body of work from a Detroit-area artist. Previous exhibitions have featured artists Bakpak Durden and Ash Arder.

Mott continues, “Vedpathak exemplifies the intention of the Fresh Paint series, which allows a Detroit artist to dive deep into their practice. In this case, it was also an exciting opportunity to showcase one of the gems from Cranbrook’s collection, Anges Martin’s Untitled (1974), and pair it with Untitled #18 (1995), a loan from our neighbor The Toledo Museum of Art.”

Born in India, Vedpathak has spent the past decade in Detroit continuing her unique “plucking” technique of manipulating paper. This time-consuming, labor-intensive process consists of creating countless incisions in painted, hand-made Japanese mulberry paper, which is known for its long, strong fibers. The result highlights questions of materiality, texture, and mark-making. Vedpathak views the act of plucking as meditative, a repetitive, ritualistic, and durational act conducted over long periods of time—often multiple months for larger pieces. In her work, Vedpathak asks the question: “When does the mundane become magical?”

The exhibition will be open from October 26, 2024 to March 2, 2025.