This year, the excitement of having a shared and immersive three-week-long, city-wide artistic experience with people in a swing city in a swing county in a swing state was missing.
Grand Rapids
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2020 ArtPrize Exhibition Canceled Over COVID-19 Concerns
Concerns over the difficulty of travel, low attendance, and gathering restrictions prompted the decision to cancel one of the largest public art events in the US.
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After Controversy, Disability Drag Show Brings Down the House
“Project [1]: Crossed Lines” demonstrated that performers are changing stereotypes about art and disability.
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Weighing Ai Weiwei’s Work Amid Butterflies and Botanical Life
Does the political content of his art translate to a botanical garden and sculpture park in Michigan?
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Suspended Glass Sculptures Visualize Cities’ Population Booms
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — It might seem like a leap, using gorgeous studio glass objects to convey potentially alarming data about population growth, but Norwood Viviano pulls the two together very persuasively.
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An Inquiry into Identity at ArtPrize
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) is one of the central hubs for the ArtPrize activities that throw the city into a cultural frenzy each fall.
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ArtPrize Is Made of People
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — All around me, swarms of people with faces caught between eagerness and beleaguerment are gravitating towards a giant paper blow-up of a detail of the American flag.
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From Carcasses of Cloth to Race Riot Chess, Some Highlights of ArtPrize 2015
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — I can’t imagine I’m the only one who found ArtPrize 7 a little underwhelming.
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Yarn Bombing ArtPrize
GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — At this year’s ArtPrize, Grand Rapids-based Collective Wings organized the Division Fibers Yarn Bomb project on Division Street, one of the most trafficked areas of the city.
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At ArtPrize, What the F is “Art”?
GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — Grand Rapids is a two hour drive due west of the state’s bankruptcy carnival that is Detroit, the hometown of President Gerald R. Ford, and the first city in the U.S. to add fluoride to its drinking water. It is an easy-to-visit city located on the banks of the Grand River whose early citizens were primarily of Dutch and German origin. Today, Grand Rapids is home to the annual ArtPrize, a sprawling, enormous art competition that covers the downtown and surrounding areas of the city.
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ArtPrize Gains New Executive Director
ArtPrize announced today the hiring of a new executive director, Christian Gaines. We spoke to Gaines, whose background is in film festival management, to discuss his plans for the organization, host to one of the largest contemporary art prizes in the world.
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Will Next Year’s ArtPrize Be Different?
Today, ArtPrize, which bills itself as the most “radically open, international art competition and social experiment,” announced it will be rejiggering its financial offerings to competitors with a more robust juried prize and less (but still) spectacular populist award.
