Public lecture series 2024–25

Cranbrook Academy of Art announces its 2024–25 public lecture series, which brings together an innovative group of artists, architects, curators, and designers.

The speakers in this series address some of the most urgent issues of our time through object-making, curation, performance, and critical writing. The visiting artist lecture series will encourage us to think expansively about the role of creativity in building community and in shaping the world around us.

All lectures free and open to the public, and are held in Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium. Lectures that are recorded will be available on the Cranbrook Academy of Art deSalle Auditorium YouTube channel. All lectures begin at 6pm EST. Visit our website for more information on each lecture. 

October 3, 2024: Charisse Weston
Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose work contends with the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy through repetition, enfoldment, and concealment.

October 24, 2024: The Knoll Lecture in Design: Brian Graham
Graham is an award-winning designer and founder and creative director of Graham Design, a studio specializing in contemporary furniture and related products for the workplace and healthcare markets.  

November 7, 2024: Axel Timm
Timm is a partner at raumlabor berlin, a Berlin-based collective of nine architects working at the intersection of architecture, city planning, art, and urban intervention.

November 21, 2024: Leonard Suryajaya
Suryajaya is a contemporary artist whose work tests the boundaries of intimacy, community and family. He uses photography, video, performance and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings and potential. 

December 5, 2024: Jomo Tariku
As a furniture designer, Jomo draws inspiration from Africa’s rich cultural heritage, historical structures, traditional furniture, craft, colors, artifacts, landscapes, wildlife, and even hairstyles.

January 16, 2025: Phong Bui
An artist, writer, independent curator, Bui also serves as co-founder/publisher/artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer. 

February 27, 2025: Porchia Moore
Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) and an Associate Professor and Rotating Program Head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. She also serves as Co-Director of the Incluseum, an international cultural heritage collaboratory. Her writing and research are widely used for training and education in museums across the United States.

March 27, 2025: Mike Cloud
Cloud is a painter and serves as an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. His work examines paintings as objects within a broader cultural system of objects, marks, symbols, motifs, and forms, and his technique blurs and blends elements into aesthetic compositions that interrogate the politics, contrivances, and language of painting and the artist’s complicity in its system of functions.

April 10, 2025: Folayemi Wilson
Wilson is an object and image maker whose work celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. They will share their work and process of mining history as material in their creative practice, and recent explorations into found textiles and other means of manipulating cloth.

About Cranbrook Academy of Art
Cranbrook Academy of Art is one of the country’s top-ranked, graduate-only programs in architecture, design, and fine art. The focus at Cranbrook is on studio practice in one of 11 disciplines: Architecture, Ceramics, Fiber, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Metalsmithing, Painting, Photography, Print Media, and Sculpture. The program is anchored by celebrated Artists-in-Residence who live and work on campus alongside our students. For more information, visit cranbrookart.edu.