Last chance to catch Toshiko Takaezu’s ‘Worlds Within’ retrospective at Cranbrook

Last call to see one of my favorite shows of the year, which closes this Sunday, Jan. 12.

I knew nothing of Toshiko Takaezu before this retrospective of her work at Cranbrook Art Museum. “Worlds Within” goes along chronologically, highlighting her array of clay work alongside some abstract paintings and other pieces. 

Takaezu’s career spanned seven decades and it’s all on display here, stretching from the 1950s through the early 2000s, when the scale and impact of her work only kept growing. (In fact, the final gallery is my favorite gallery on display here.)

There’s early student work from her time studying in Hawaii. There’s work from her time spent teaching at Cranbrook, which is a nice feather in the cap for this storied institution in Bloomfield Hills that’s an international draw for artists to study and for patrons to gawk at their collections.

What isn’t captured in the bio of Takaezu’s “Worlds Within” is how warm, engaging and downright wonderful this exhibition is — even when it blasts off into outer space.

Takaezu’s “Moonscapes” are stars of the show here — a galaxy of large spherical sculptures (two large bowls brought together) hanging snuggly in fiber hammocks created by Lenore Tawney for a show all the way back in 1979. They were displayed a decade after the Apollo mission, which tilted Takaezu towards creating these pieces.

Alongside the hammocks, Takaezu creates a small galaxy of these spheres in front of another one of Tawney’s fiber pieces. 

We’re not all on the artistic orbit of Takaezu, but these pieces provide an out-of-this-world viewing experience that’s grounded and inviting to those of us stuck down here on Earth.

“Worlds Within” wraps with large vessels from Takaezu’s “Star Series.” The stoneware vessels are modeled after Korean storage jars and require large kilns to be made. The abstract coloring on the exterior of each one makes it feel like you’re stumbling into an alien graveyard.

They are stunning explorations of scale within the world of clay, the sheer size of which I’ve rarely seen displayed with such humbling affect.

When Takaezu plays with scale, it’s magical. And she knew size isn’t everything throughout her career.

“Sometimes the small one has everything.”

She kept making smaller, more playful works alongside the authoritative stature of her take on Korean storage jars.

It helps weave a story of an artist who never lost sight of playfulness within her work even as her work grew as large in scale as the planets above that fascinated her.

And a true celebration of clay and stoneware, a medium which rarely gets it’s own retrospective on this scale in metro Detroit’s cultural scene.

“Ryan Patrick Hooper goes to…” is published by WDET in partnership with Midbrow.

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