Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research invites you to a special screening of the Director’s Cut of the Center’s new documentary, Room for a Lady: Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook. Originally produced for the Center’s May 2022 fundraiser, A House Party at Cranbrook, the expanded Director’s Cut of this exploration of the life and career of designer and textile artist Loja Saarinen includes a new interview with Saarinen’s granddaughter, landscape architect Susan Saarinen. A conversation with the film’s director, Kevin Adkisson, and two of the film’s guest experts, Gerhardt Knodel and Nina Blomfield, will follow the screening.

Seating in deSalle Auditorium is limited and the event is expected to sell out. Admission to the lecture includes admission to the galleries of Cranbrook Art Museum.

Room for a Lady: Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook tells the remarkable story of textile designer and entrepreneur Loja Saarinen.

Trained in sculpture with experience in photography, model making, and design, Loja Saarinen emigrated from Finland to America in 1923 and worked alongside her husband, architect Eliel Saarinen, in the building of Cranbrook. She founded and led Studio Loja Saarinen from 1928 to 1942, creating handwoven rugs, curtains, and fabrics with a dedicated team of Swedish immigrant weavers for clients around the nation. The Studio’s painterly, geometric textiles complete the architectural vision of Cranbrook as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Loja’s story has remained too long in the shadows; Room for a Lady brings her artistic contributions to Cranbrook into the spotlight.

Written and directed by the Center’s curator, Kevin Adkisson, Room for a Lady incorporates interviews, historic images from Cranbrook Archives, and new high-definition video of Studio Loja Saarinen textiles pulled from the vaults of Cranbrook Art Museum and displayed in their original settings to weave together a fascinating story of craft, architecture, and female entrepreneurship.

Cranbrook Academy of Art Director Emeritus and Former Fiber Department Head and Artist-in-Residence Gerhardt Knodel points out a detail of a Studio Loja Saarinen curtain on camera in Saarinen House for Room for a Lady: Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook, April 25, 2022; Photography by Kevin Adkisson, Courtesy Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.