Cranbrook Art Museum

About this Museum

Based in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the Cranbrook Art Museum’s collection features outstanding examples of modern and contemporary art, craft, architecture, and design from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and serves as a repository for the history and innovations of Cranbrook Academy of Art and its artists. Its permanent collection includes works by Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, Carl Milles, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others.

Part of the Eliel Saarinen–designed Cranbrook educational community and complex, the museum is one of the oldest in the country. Founded by prominent Detroit newspaper publisher George Booth and his wife, Ellen Scripps Booth, who purchased the land in 1904, the Cranbrook Art Museum was born in 1927 when Booth formally presented the Cranbrook Foundation with a selection of his personal art collection, a mix of art and artifacts from multiple centuries that included glass, ceramics, paintings, architectural fragments, furniture, metalwork, and sculpture. In 1928, the museum presented its first temporary exhibition, a traveling show on contemporary interior design organized by the American Union of Decorative Arts. In 1930, the Academy of Art published the first inventory of the “Cranbrook Museum,” and the collection was made available to Cranbrook’s students and the surrounding community.

The museum is housed in the same building as the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which was formally completed in 1942 under the direction of Saarinen. Between 2009 and 2011, the building was closed for renovation and expansion. Since its beginning, the museum’s mission has been to provide both students and the general public with access to contemporary art and design.