Fourth Annual Lillian and Donald Bauder Lecture

CRANBROOK CENTER FOR COLLECTIONS AND RESEARCH PRESENTS
 

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World

Lecture and Conversation with Brendan Cormier
Senior Design Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

Sunday, April 5th, 2020 | 3:00pm
Cranbrook Art Museum deSalle Auditorium
39221 Woodward Avenue
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304

The Lecture will be followed by a Reception and Book Signing in the Art Museum’s Art Lab located on the Lower Level of the Art Museum.

The Cranbrook Archives Reading Room will be open before the lecture, from 2:00 – 3:00pm, and during the Reception from 4:00 – 5:00pm.  On display will be a selection of documents, drawings, and photographs related to “Cranbrook and the Car.” The Reading Room is located in the Art Museum’s Collections Wing, near the Art Lab.

Lecture Admission is Free
Seating is Limited

Exhibition Catalog
$45 (tax included)

About The Lecture

Brendan Cormier is the co-curator of the V&A’s current groundbreaking exhibition, Cars: Accelerating the Modern World (on display in London through April 19, 2020). More than a show about car design, the exhibition and accompanying catalog present the car as a force for change that increased the pace of life in the twentieth century. Often embodying an image in constant, fast, free-flowing movement, the car has symbolized all kinds of social, political, personal, and economic transformation.

Today, as the car approaches its 150th anniversary, Cormier argues that the short but significant history of this nearly ubiquitous machine is entering a period of drastic change. With oil stocks running out, the climate warming, and massive crowding and congestion on our roads and in our cities, designers, manufacturers, town planners, politicians, and economists are all aware that the design of the car needs to shift if we want to survive.  Presented from a European perspective, Cormier’s lecture will not only celebrate the ingenuity of the car and its fascinating impact on the world, but also confront some of the more undesirable outcomes brought about by the invention of the automobile.

About the Speaker

Brendan Cormier is a Senior Design Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and co-curator of Cars: Accelerating the Modern World. From 2014 to 2017 he was the lead curator of the V&A Gallery at Design Society in Shenzhen, China.  In 2016 he curated the first Pavilion of Applied Arts at the Venice Biennale, with an exhibition called A World of Fragile Parts. Prior to working at the V&A, Cormier was the managing editor of Volume magazine.

“CRANBROOK AND THE CAR” ON DISPLAY IN CRANBROOK ARCHIVES READING ROOM

Foreshadowing the Detroit Institute of Arts Summer 2020 exhibition, Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950 – 2020 (opening June 13, 2020), as well as the shift of the North American International Auto Show from January to June, Brendan Cormier’s lecture at Cranbrook also will celebrate Cranbrook’s connection to the world of automotive design.  Two of these connections will be featured in the Cranbrook Archives Reading Room before and after Cormier’s lecture.

James Scripps Booth (1888 – 1954), the eldest son of Cranbrook founders George and Ellen Booth, spent his career as an automobile designer and founder of several car companies, most notably the Scripps-Booth Company.  Described as the “aristocrat of small cars,” his vehicles often were found in the garages of Europe’s elite, including the King of Spain, the Queen of Holland, and, closer to the V&A in London, Winston Churchill.

Suzanne Vanderbilt (1933 – 1988), who received an MFA from Cranbrook in 1965 while on leave from the design department at General Motors, had a distinguished career at GM, one of Harley Earl’s “Damsels of Design.” Two of Vanderbilt’s designs, including her Pink Panther design from 1965, are featured in the Cars: Accelerating the Modern World exhibition, on loan from Cranbrook Archives. 

ABOUT THE CATALOG

The exhibition catalog, Cars: Accelerating the Modern World, is available for advance-purchase only from the Center and will be available for pick up at the lecture.  The catalog must be purchased online and paid in advance by 1:00pm on March 20, 2020.  Edited by Brendan Cormier and the exhibition’s co-curator, Elizabeth Bisley, the 224-page, paperback publication features thirteen essays and is richly illustrated with 150 color and black-and-white images. Cars: Accelerating the Modern World is published by V&A Publishing.

About the V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, known as the V&A, is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects. The Museum holds many of the United Kingdom's national collections and houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewelry, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, and theatre and performance. From its early beginnings as a Museum of Manufactures in 1852, to the foundation stone laid by Queen Victoria in 1899, to today's state-of-the-art galleries, the Museum has constantly evolved in its collecting and public interpretation of art and design. Its collections span 5,000 years of human creativity in virtually every medium, housed in one of the finest groups of Victorian and modern buildings in Britain.

ABOUT THE LILLIAN AND DONALD BAUDER LECTURE SERIES

This is the fourth lecture in the Center’s Lillian and Donald Bauder Lecture Series. Established in 2016 through a generous gift from Cranbrook President Emeritus Dr. Lillian Bauder and her late husband Donald Bauder, this endowed lecture series allows the Center to bring to campus speakers of international significance whose work intersects with the history of Cranbrook and its legacy for future generations.

The inaugural Bauder Lecture in 2017 brought to Cranbrook author David Sax for a conversation about his book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (2016); the second lecture in April 2018 featured Columbia University professor of art history and MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll who told the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career and the successful transfer of the Wright’s archive from Taliesin to New York; and, in May 2019, Tim Whalen, Director of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, presented the third lecture during which he discussed the Institute’s on-going role in the conservation of the world’s cultural heritage.   

A visionary leader, Dr. Bauder served as Cranbrook’s President and Chief Executive Officer from 1983 to 1996, a period during which she not only developed Cranbrook’s first community-wide strategic plans but also created a master plan that ultimately led to the building of the Vlasic Early Childhood Center, the Williams Natatorium, the Academy of Art’s New Studios Building, and the expansion of the Institute of Science.  In 1996, Dr. Bauder became Vice President of Masco Corporation, a position she held until she retired in 2007.  A 2014 recipient of Cranbrook’s prestigious Founders Award, Dr. Bauder now resides in Columbia, Maryland.

LECTURE LOCATION AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Cranbrook Art Museum is located at the center of Cranbrook’s campus and accessed through Cranbrook’s main entrance at 39221 Woodward Avenue.  Free parking is available in the Art Museum’s main lot on the east side of the Art Museum and in the parking deck located midway between Cranbrook Art Museum and Cranbrook Institute of Science.

Cranbrook Art Museum
39221 Woodward Avenue
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 48304

For additional information in advance of the lecture, please call the Center at 248.645.3307.  For information and assistance on the afternoon of the lecture, please call the Art Museum’s Front Desk at 248.645.3320.

ACCESSIBLE ENTRANCE TO CRANBROOK ART MUSEUM
Cranbrook Art Museum and the lecture in deSalle Auditorium is accessible to visitors who use wheelchairs or who need to avoid stairs.  Access for these visitors and their escorts is accommodated through the New Studios Building on the southeast side of Cranbrook Art Museum.  Accessible parking spaces are located at the south end of the Art Museum’s main parking lot, in front of the New Studios Building. Visitors that would like to use the barrier-free entrance should use the ramped sidewalk that leads to the front of the New Studios Building and enter the building through the glass vestibule to the right.  Once in the vestibule there is a phone where visitors may call a Visitor Services Representative at extension 3320.  We encourage visitors that would like assistance to also call the Center in advance of the lecture at 248.645.3307.

PHOTO CREDITS
Header Image: James Scripps Booth (Artist), Le Grand Prix – France Mural, 1914, Cranbrook House, Tower Garage. Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Cultural Properties Collections, Founders Collection (CEC 1137).  Photography by R. H. Hensleigh; Copyright Cranbrook Archives.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World Exhibition Installation View (detail). Photography Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World Exhibition Installation View. Photography Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Brendan Cormier. Photography Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

Suzanne Vanderbilt (Designer), Pink Panther Automotive Design for General Motors Corporation, 1965. Suzanne Vanderbilt Papers, Cranbrook Archives (1998-02). Photography Courtesy Cranbrook Archives.

Jonathan Abbott (Designer), Cars: Accelerating the Modern World Book Cover, 2019. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Courtesy V&A Publishing.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England. Photography Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.