As always, I have enough photos for at least a couple of posts about ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, so here's a few random pictures and thoughts as a follow-up to my Tuesday recap of this year's grand pubic art festival and competition.
We always like stopping off at the B.O.B. (Big Old Building) as there are plenty of art pieces at this multi-floor venue with its restaurants and open courtyard display.
We found the "Tired Pandas" by Nick Jakubiak, a Top Ten choice in public voting, as well as the very cool "Bird of Prey" from Tom Sheerin in the B.O.B.'s open yard. I cast a vote for both of these in the preliminary round of voting because I liked how each artist used recycled items to create a new work of art.
We found the "Egg Prize" piece by David Kall in front of the Van Andel Arena, where a steady line of folks lined up to insert 50 cents into the machine to get their own piece of original art in a plastic egg. The hand-built nine-foot-tall art dispenser worked like a gum ball machine, and my prize was a hand-designed sticker. Each prize was different, and the quarters collected went to the artists who helped Kall create the miniature pieces of art. This reminded me of an Art-o-Mat machine I found in Chicago made from an obsolete cigarette machine that dispensed similar mini masterpieces.
Some ArtPrize pieces addressed serious issues like an entry from God's Kitchen, an organization that runs food pantries for the hungry in Grand Rapids. I knew about God's Kitchen as one of Tim's relatives made a donation to the group in our name one Christmas. The 2013 ArtPrize piece consisted of a representative "John Doe" figure perched atop a pile of hand-made pottery bowls donated by local potters.
Is it just me, or is it a bit ironic to see this piece in the luxurious lobby of the Four-Diamond Amway Grand Plaza Hotel?
Another one of my favorite ArtPrize pieces was "Grand Rapids - Downtown - HDR Time Lapse" by Jason Hulet, a Real Estate photographer from the Traverse City area.
Hulet's work consists of 20,700 individual exposures processed into 6,900 High Dynamic Range images set to run as a time-lapse video. I'm not normally a big fan of HDR images, but I loved the idea of taking some fairly prosaic images of downtown buildings and creating something quite artistic with them.
We heard a lot about the SiTE:LAB venue last year, and finally got to see it for ourselves this year. The building at 54 Jefferson is the former home of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, going vacant in 1994 when the museum moved to a site downtown on the Grand River. Even as the building lay vacant, the museum never sold it and pieces of the old exhibits and the spacious main hall remain intact. SiTE:LAB is a Grand Rapids-based non-profit that organizes art exhibits in temporary locations. The museum and the City of Grand Rapids made the venue available to SiTE:LAB, which turned it into a venue that won ArtPrize awards for Best Venue in 2011 and 2012. I overheard several visitors talking about plans and possibilities for this venue as a new anchor for the neighborhood and exciting hub for various arts and cultural events.
The venue's main hall hosted artist Mark Dean Veca's "Year of the Snake" installation that honored the building's past partially as a natural science museum and likening its current ongoing transformation in 2013 (the Year of the Snake according to the Chinese Zodiac) to the animal's shedding of its skin as a symbol of transformation.
This weekend sees the announcement of the winners of this year's ArtPrize. It's always exciting to see who wins the big awards and how some of my favorites fare each year.
© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved
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