Cranbrook Has a Beautiful Campus, But It's Rotten with Race-Fetishism
Cranbrook houses an impressive art school and museum complex, but like other major art institutions, it's overly influenced by racial politics
Bloomfield Hills — The Cranbrook Academy of Art and its sister museum are lauded across the art world. Founded in 1932, the art school consistently ranks in the top 10 programs nationwide. The museum’s permanent collection features such standouts as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
By all accounts, a visit to Cranbrook should immerse a visitor in the finest art there is to offer. Instead, like many contemporary art institutions, the most impressive thing is the building.
Cranbrook isn’t just an art school, of course. The Cranbrook Educational Community sprawls out across a 319 scenic acre campus in Bloomfield Hills. There’s the art school and museum, and also an institute of science, a private school, an episcopal church, and the original residence built for the founders, George and Ellen Scripps Booth.
The campus draws you in immediately when you pass the gate, with rolling hills and winding roads carved through expansive forests. It feels like a world apart from the rest of the area, self-contained and contemplative. An ideal place to make and think about art.
No doubt, that’s a large part of the school’s appeal. Apart from the degrees, which are very well regarded amongst the academic art world as some of the best, the grounds and buildings are simply beautiful. One can certainly picture painting away in a studio, watching the trees blow and the snow fall, and roaming the grounds deep in thought as a true ideal of academic life.
The main campus buildings, the art school and the museum, are formed in a curiously distinct blend of art deco and arts and crafts sensibilities. A set of bronze sculptures, nude, elongated human figures, springing out of a large pool of water, greets you at the entrance. Towering square columns of stone form a large portico, with entrances to the museum and school on the left and right, and a large stone staircase down to the gardens beckoning onwards.
There’s a real sense of monumental aspiration to the buildings, a confident assertion of presence, characteristic of the best architecture of the period. The sculpture pool and the columns leave one with a distinctly Greco-Roman sensibility, yet entirely midcentury modern American in their final form of bronze and warm stone.
All in all, it feels like the product of a nation, and a people, boldly claiming the historical legacy of the western world, while putting forth a new vision of its future.
The irony is, the buildings and the grounds are so magnificent that they dwarf the art within. Aside from the permanent collection, which has some genuinely impressive standouts, Cranbrook’s museum and art school suffer from the same deficiencies as the rest of the academic and institutional art world.
The same obsession with race and identity politics that has consumed the rest of the art world is endemic at Cranbrook. You see it mostly through a curatorial lens, the artists and works selected for exhibitions. No doubt, it’s rife throughout the art school as well.
The central exhibition in the museum, Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection, is a curated display of works from Cranbrook graduate students and visiting artists over the last few decades. There’s no stated ideological concept for the show, other than to mix and match different works from the permanent collection.
A few are genuinely impressive displays of skill and material. For example, Brittany Nelson’s large scale chemigram, a photographic print made with chemicals instead of light from a lens, resonated with me personally as a photographer interested in similar methods.
Cranbrook does have a substantial and impressive permanent collection. The institution does have the capacity to put on great exhibitions. The display of abstract expressionist paintings in the rear gallery, characteristic of the modernist era that Cranbrook is most known for, was beautiful and fitting for their context.
Many of the works, however, were the sort of trite, surface-level depictions of racial identity so popular in museums since the peak woke era. Facile depictions of racial minority groups that only exist in the museum spaces to make their own presence known. They insist upon themselves.
Other exhibitions proved the same. A series of digitally rendered fabric pieces, complete with sparkles and glitter, that despite the lofty wall text about “colonial and imperialist histories” and “Afrosurreal worlds,” was essentially just a display about black girl magic.
The artist might even embrace that critique, but let’s be honest about what the work is about. It’s about furthering racial identity issues into the context of fine art, and into the museum space, and forcing the viewer to engage with the artist’s notions of racial identity.
That’s a charitable interpretation, to be honest, and one that the curatorial staff of these museums would happily agree with. That’s exactly the intention here, and is one that this crowd perceives as good and noble.
My critique of Cranbrook, like with all of these institutions, isn’t that they’re incompetent at doing what they intend to do. It’s that their intentions are actually detrimental to art, and to the artists they claim to support, in the end. It reduces art to something shallow, masquerading as deep. It’s race fetishism pretending to be dialogue.
Cranbrook boasts an iconic campus, with a truly magnificent architectural landscape, and all the talent and resources in the world to be a true gem of the global art world. Like with so many other art institutions, it’s a shame to see the curatorial rot, the creeping tendency to supplant the broader art historical legacy with the (increasingly unfashionable) politics of race and identity.
