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Liisa and Elizabeth Salonen Exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit

August 29, 2025

Work by Liisa Salonen (BS Design, ​’71) and Elizabeth Salonen, mother and daughter designers, artists, and collaborators, will be featured in the installation What We Carry at the Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit as part of Detroit Month of Design 2025.

Liisa Salonen and Elizabeth Salonen
Liisa Elizabeth Salonen Pewabic 2
Liisa Salonen and Elizabeth Salonen, mother and daughter collaborators, merge the seductive qualities of clay with industrial mold-making techniques in the installation What We Carry.

The collaboration traces back to the 1940s, when Liisa’s mother studied under Mary Chase Perry (Stratton) at Pewabic in Detroit’s east side. In 2023, the two decided to return to their legacy and take a class at Pewabic, bringing the story full circle. Already exploring slip casting, Elizabeth was interested in blending industrial processes with hand building. The molds for What We Carry were made at Pewabic, and then layered with strips of clay in an intense hand process that intentionally preserves the seams and surface markings of the molds.
What we carry05 Liisa Elizabeth Salonen sm
These archetypal mannequins expose their life experience in the beauty of scars, in the unglazed body of the clay and in the seams of production. Mannequin heads, typically used for displaying objects relating to personal adornment, support a variety of orbs in the act of carrying. In contrast to the unglazed, naked head, the carried and un-carried orb-vessels are hand-polished, sensuous terra sigilatta or fiber.
Love D 04
Create the letter ​“V” as in the sentence ​“I love you” in black and white Helvetica. DeepAI. February 13, 2023, 9:55 PM. Drawing: Liisa Salonen.
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Create the letter ​“I” as in the sentence ​“I love Detroit,” in the font Helvetica and in black and white. DeepAI. March 31, 2023 at 7:10 PM.

I Love Detroit, an exhibition of Liisa Salonen’s research-based typography drawings, will also be on view at the Metropolian Museum of Design Detroit during the Detroit Month of Design 2025.

What would I get if I asked a generative AI platform to create the letter ​“D,” as in the word ​“Detroit”?
Early in 2023, I began researching how prompts functioned in OpenAI’s text-to-image systems. Over the course of 587 prompts, I explored how abstract language would be interpreted by a tool still in its raw, emergent state.

I was curious — how would the algorithm ​“see” the letter ​“D”?

Each hand-drawn letter in the series ​“I Love Detroit” is influenced by that process — a fragmented letterform, the colors of love, flesh. These are not just letterforms, they are traces of the body, where the gestures of drawing and painting are a kind of resistance against the machine and what it cannot give us: joy, intuition, the pleasure of making. This is the edge between us and the algorithm.


Liisa Salonen and Elizabeth Salonen: WHAT WE CARRY
Liisa Salonen: I Love Detroit
Exhibition Opening: September 6, 2025, 6 – 9pm
Exhibition Dates: September 6 – 30, 2025
Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit, 905 Henry Street, 3rd floor, Detroit, Michigan 48201