Why This Sale MattersCelebrated Art At Extraordinary Prices
This is not decorator art. Every piece in this sale was made by a working artist during a graduate residency at one of the two most influential art programs in postwar America — at the exact moment those programs were shaping the artists who would go on to define American studio craft, printmaking, and painting for the next fifty years. All pieces are at least 40 years old.
This sale isn’t just a chance to buy real graduate-studio art at a remarkable price — it directly funds NCModernist, the largest free, open digital archive of Modernist residential design in the state. NCModernist has documented more than 300 Carolina architects, catalogued over 5,000 Modernist houses, and with USModernist scanned more than 5,000,000 pages of historic architecture magazines — all of it freely accessible to the public at ncmodernist.org.
Comparable graduate-era studio work from these programs routinely brings several hundred dollars at auction and estate sale. This is a fraction of that. Signed works are $59. Unsigned works are $29.
Cranbrook Academy of Art
Cranbrook has never run like a conventional art school. There are no lecture courses and no letter grades — each of its departments is led by a single resident Artist-in-Residence, and a small cohort of just five to fifteen students per department works alongside that mentor for the full two years, entirely self-directed. It is closer to an artist colony than a classroom, and it has been that way since Eliel Saarinen shaped the campus in the 1930s. By the 1970s, that model was firing on all cylinders. The Print Media department, under Artist-in-Residence Laurence Barker, drove a nationally influential revival of hand papermaking that defined a generation of Cranbrook printmakers. The painting program, true to Cranbrook form, imposed no house style — students worked fluidly between abstraction and figuration, guided rather than instructed. In the 1980s, as the design departments pushed the school into the vanguard of postmodernism, the fine art departments were producing the painters and printmakers who would go on to fill American museum collections. A Cranbrook MFA from this era is a credential very few artists ever earned — the entire Academy has never enrolled more than about 150 students at a time, across all ten departments combined.
University of Michigan
Michigan took a different path to the same moment. In 1974, following a two-year self-study of how creative studies could thrive at a major research university, U-M formally established its School of Art as an independent unit — giving painters, printmakers, and watercolorists a dedicated graduate home for the first time, backed by the resources of a Big Ten university. That independence was tested almost immediately: in the early 1980s the school was ordered to cut a quarter of its budget as the university reallocated funds, and in March 1983 its students staged some of the most visible campus protests in the school’s history in its defense — organized with professor Ted Ramsay, a fight that helped secure the program’s survival. The artists who trained through that decade of institutional struggle and reinvention produced work with real grit: a studio art MFA earned at Michigan in the late ’70s and early ’80s came out of a program that had to prove, year after year, why it deserved to exist. That urgency shows in the work.