Opening Reception | Balancing Acts: Janet Abrams: 5–7 P.M.

Join us on 30 January from 5 to 7 P.M. for the opening reception of Balancing Acts, the first solo exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna and renowned art, architecture and design critic Janet Abrams, and comprising over a dozen sculptures that put clay in conversation with diverse materials including steel, copper, rawhide, rubber, and wood. Drawing inspiration from the work of 20^th-century sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Ruth Duckworth, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Barbara Hepworth, and Ruth Vollmer, Abrams's sculptures set opacity and weight in contrast to translucency and levity and reject the convention that ceramic artifacts must be earth- or pedestal- bound. Forms and materials are brought together in compositions that seem to harness kinetic energy, conveying a frisson of risk—a condition she describes as "a metaphor for the precariousness of life itself."