The ArtPrize platform creates a system that values creativity, experimentation and above all, collaboration. Artists are encouraged to build a relationship and partner with a venue as early as possible to create a memorable and successful installation. Registration dates include:

Venue Registration
Open: Monday, March 12 (Noon EDT)
Close: Thursday April 12 (5:00 p.m. EDT)

Artist Registration/Connections Open
Monday, April 23 (Noon EDT)

Artist Registration Close
Thursday, May 24 (5:00 p.m. EDT)

Connections Period Close
Thursday, June 14 (5:00 p.m. EDT)

There are few differences between the 2011 and 2012 registration process, key changes include simultaneous Artist Registration and Connections Period, allowing artists to immediately coordinate with a venue upon registration. Connections will remain open beyond Artist Registration until June 14.

Any art proposed for installation in the Grand River, which runs through the center of the ArtPrize district, must be submitted to the city of Grand Rapids and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) according to the following schedule:

Pre-application filed with the City of Grand Rapids
Monday, March 5

Application filed with the DEQ
Friday, March 16

The DNRE will process the application using the following steps:

Public notice period begins: Friday, March 30
Public notice period ends: Friday, April 20
Public hearing, if requested: Friday, May 18
Required time for comments: Tuesday, May 29

Permit Decision
Thursday, June 7

This process allows the State of Michigan and City of Grand Rapids to review proposed work and ensure that the installation meets specific criteria relevant to the environmental, structural and navigability impact on the river.

In ArtPrize 2011, Mia Tavonatti, of Orange Co. Calif., captured the top prize of $250,000 for her work, Crucifixion. Chris LaPorte of Grand Rapids, Mich. won the top prize in 2010 with Cavalry, American Officers, 1921, and Ran Ortner of Brooklyn, N.Y. won in 2009 for his work Open Water No. 24.

From Scott Watkins, with AEG:

“The study provides a comprehensive assessment of event attendance, visitor spending, local spending by the ArtPrize organization, and the economic impacts that accrue beyond the initial expenditures of visitors and the host organization. It also accounts for economic substitution. The analysis illustrates the new economic activity attributable to ArtPrize and does not double count spending in the area that would have otherwise occurred if the event was not held.”

The full report can be found here. Read the whole thing.

ArtPrize is supportive of this research study. From our perspective, communities thrive when people are given the flexibility and encouragement to be creative and a population is provided with the freedom to voice their opinions, and to just plain have fun. The Anderson study shows that small experiments like ArtPrize can grow to have significant impact, and we are pleased that our region is thriving as a result.

We hope 2012 will be an even bigger year for ArtPrize, with the tweaks we announced earlier this month:

• self-sustainability
• enabling the “credible mass” within the “critical mass”
• empowered professional voices

ArtPrize thanks everyone for a successful 2011, and we look forward to seeing you in the new year!

The $100,000 award will be added to a revised list of public and juried prizes that will be distributed at the end of the 19-day event.

ArtPrize 2012 will take place Sept. 19 – Oct. 7, 2012.

With its public vote and juried awards, ArtPrize explores the tension between professional and populist in an epic conversation. In 2011, nearly 400,000 people visited Grand Rapids to engage with the work and ideas of nearly 1,600 artists. The new award changes the dynamic of the competition, and increases the total awards the event distributes to $550,000, making it the largest total prize purse for art in the world.

In addition to the Juried Grand Prize, ArtPrize will also increase its other juried awards to $20,000 each. The organization selected five categories to recognize:

• Two-Dimensional
• Three-Dimensional
• Time and Performance
• Urban Space
• Venue

The increased commitment to juried awards will change the dynamic of the event and sets up a purposeful dialog between the opinions of arts professionals and the public, focusing on the artists’ work. Jurors for all of the professional awards will be announced in the spring, prior to artist registration.

“For the past three years, ArtPrize has set itself apart by empowering the public and giving them a critical voice, but the success of the event is based on the exchange of artists’ ideas,” said DeVos. “We want ArtPrize to be accessible for everyone, so we hope the new awards will help artists understand our goals and encourage them bring new ideas to the event.”

The changes in Juried Prizes will result in a revision of the ArtPrize Public Vote Awards:
Public Vote Award Revisions

• Top Prize 2011: $250,000 2012: $200,000
• 2nd 2011: $100,000 2012: $75,000
• 3rd 2011: $50,000 2012: $50,000
• 4th-10th 2011: $7,000 2012: $5,000

The prize total for the public awards in 2012 will be $350,000, vastly outweighing the juried awards at $200,000, and keeping the organization’s focus on the community.

“The engagement of the community continues to be at the forefront of ArtPrize’s success,” added Catherine Creamer, executive director of ArtPrize. “Nearly 400,000 people participated in ArtPrize in 2011, not because we told them art mattered, but because we create a system where THEY matter to art.”

ArtPrize 2011 had more than 38,000 registered voters who submitted 383,000 total votes. With the increase of smartphones, mobile voting via the ArtPrize iPhone and new Android apps increased 62 percent.

ArtPrize 2011 began Sept. 21 with 1,582 artists from 39 countries and 43 U.S. states installing their work at 164 venues in a three-square-mile district in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Artist and venue registration for ArtPrize 2012 will be announced after the beginning of the year. For more information, visit www.artprize.org.

Everyone has their story of Fred Meijer. Many of them involve purple cows, penny ponies or incredible deals. But Fred’s most lasting legacy goes beyond his role as a retail innovator. His goal was to make our world a better place, and he did this by helping communities explore the relationship between art and nature.

In 2005 The Wall Street Journal wrote, “There’s nothing quite like Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park this side of the Kröller-Müller Museum and Sculpture Park in The Netherlands.” This was, and still is, a significant endorsement for an organization that is little more than 15 years old.

Fred originally saw Meijer Gardens as a place to house his growing collection of Marshall Fredericks sculptures, but he ended up establishing something much greater: one of the nation’s most significant sculpture experiences. The success of Meijer Gardens is something that other art museums and botanic gardens around the world have worked to emulate in their organizations, but few have been able to recreate the same duality between art and nature that Meijer Gardens has found.

In fewer than two decades, Meijer Gardens has helped bring countless artist voices to the United States, many for the first time, and paired their work with our ever-changing Midwest landscapes. This commitment to challenging the public with new ideas has become Fred’s lasting legacy.

Fred’s legacy is something at we all can aspire toward–creating new ideas, big ideas, ideas that can come from anyone and be experimented with anywhere.

Fred believed in the endless possibilities of our cultural landscape. We will miss him dearly.

Here’s the basics: the platform invites five presenters to show five slides for five minutes to five judges for a chance at $5,000.

Among the judges is ArtPrize’s own Catherine Creamer, our executive director, and an entrepreneur as well as an artist in her own right. Catherine joins four others, including Rick DeVos, Sam Cummings, principal and managing partner at CWD Real Estate, Jay Frankhouse, partner at Fuel-D, and Diana Sieger, president of the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, For more on Catherine’s background, and the bios of the other judges go here.

In the same way that ArtPrize believes that anyone can be an artist, 5×5 believes that anyone can have a good idea for a business or a project. The platform is specifically designed to help each one of us to take small risks by lowering the first barrier to entrepreneurship–getting people to listen.

This is also the first event where all 5×5 presenters have been chosen by the community. You can still vote for presenters at the 5×5 Night website. Sign up and vote today. We’ll all see how the experiment unfolds.

5×5 Night returns the Cook Auditorium in the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 5:00-7:30PM. $5 admission. More here.

It’s getting to be that time of the year. A season of giving that everyone loves.

People in West Michigan love to shop local. ArtPrize has listened to the requests from our friends, and so for the first time ever, we will re-open The HUB Store at 41 Sheldon Blvd. for holiday shopping starting at Noon on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011.

And to make things even more magical, most of the store’s iconic ArtPrize merchandise has been marked down 40 percent.

According to the 3/50 Project, a small-business advocacy group, for every $100 spent in locally owned, independent stores, $68 returns to the community. Imagine the potential impact, since every purchase in the ArtPrize store will help support art in our community and help keep the ArtPrize event free for everyone.

The ArtPrize Store will open Tuesday, Nov. 15 through Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011. The store will be generously staffed by volunteers and therefore closed Thanksgiving Day and Friday, Nov. 25.

HOURS:
November: Tuesday – Friday; Noon – 6:00 p.m.
December: Tuesday – Saturday; Noon – 6:00 p.m.

LOCATION:
The ArtPrize HUB Store
41 Sheldon Blvd.
Grand Rapids, Mich.

In the first week of ArtPrize, nearly 28,000 people registered to vote. Impressive? Absolutely. People are excited about looking at art and have chosen Grand Rapids as their destination. Now, was the top ten what some of us had hoped for? Not so much. But perhaps it’s time to turn the focus from the results to the system that allows the general public to vote in the first place.

For myself, the outcome this year begets questions about how the voting system might be flawed and, if so, how the organization can improve it. And from my observations of the public over the past two weeks, I’ve often wondered if people are casting votes with prudence or if they are they shooting from the hip, so to speak, treating it like a game that has no real life consequence? It seems that a fundamental problem of the ArtPrize voting system is that it’s too easy. Voters have almost as many things to look at as they have opportunities to give thumbs up or down.

Consider the following ideas (some of which are not my own) that might change how people vote and the results we’re seeing: What if you could cast no more than twenty-five votes in the first week and ten votes the second week? What if you could only cast five votes per neighborhood? Or what if you were limited to ten votes across the entire competition? What if voting at ArtPrize worked more like building a personal collection of art you really loved as opposed to clicking on things you liked?

Personally, I prefer the latter idea because in trying to do this for myself, I was challenged to come up with ten entries I felt strongly enough about to post here. What follows are my top nine picks, listed in no particular order:

Mimi Kato, "One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town" (Scene 1: Golden Sky, golden start) 2010. Archival Pigment Print, 7' x 32'. Venue: Kendall College of Art & Design.

Amusement abounds in Mimi Kato’s cartoonish computer-generated landscape One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town, wherein Kato is everyone and everyone is her. Drawing on Japanese historical arts (including theatre) and her childhood memories, Kato appears in drastically different ages groups, roles, and positions. From showering in a home to brawling on the street to exercising with a group of clones, the artist creates the pulse of this city. Hands down my number one pick this year, I was delighted when Kato received this year’s juried award for two-dimensional work.

Christopher Yockey, "Saying I Do," 2011. Steel, 5' x 8' 1'. Venue: Grand Rapids Art Museum.

Christopher Yockey’s wall sculpture Saying I Do is easy to miss at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, where it hangs nearish the room of paper tree trunks. In Yockey’s hands, steel takes on the appearance of paper cutouts and spray paint. I’d love to see an entire room or storefront devoted to his whimsical and graffiti-esque forms.

Ryan Spencer Reed, "Sudan: The Cost of Silence," 2009. Photographic installation, 9' x 60' x 1'. Venue: DeVos Place.

Fortunately, Ryan Spencer Reed returned to ArtPrize after showing his Detroit series at Devos Place in 2010. His keen photojournalistic eye coupled with his experience of living in Sudanese refugee camps come together in Sudan: The Cost of Silence. Reed pictures of the war torn region serve to raise awareness of human suffering without leaning to extremes. While heart-wrenching they art not horrid and though beautiful they are not romantic.

The Screwed Arts Collective (Christopher Burch, Daniel Burnett, Stan Chisholm, Chris Harris, Daniel Jefferson, Kris Mosby, Jason Spencer, Justin Tolentino and Bryan Walsh), "Screwed Rapids (Wall Drawing #3)," 2011. Photo: Vince Dudzinski. Venue: UICA.

In general, painters exhibited stronger works in ArtPrize 2011 than I recall there being in previous years. But none grabbed me the same way as Screwed Rapids (Wall Drawing #3), created in situ by The Screwed Arts Collective. While I wished there had been more room to stand back from this vibrant mural and take everything in at once, it is a beautiful installation from any angel. This energetic and colorful mix of abstract and figurative imagery offered me something new every time I passed by.

Kevin Kammeraad, The Kevin Kammeraad and Friends Puppet Theatre, 2011. Live performance. Venue: Children's Museum, outdoors.

Puppeteer-cum-endurance-performer Kevin Kammeraad could be found day after day on the grass outside the Children’s Museum kicking, wiggling, shaking, and singing with an excited crowd of children and parents. His energy was infectious. Playful and educational, I loved what The Kevin Kammeraad and Friends Puppet Theatre added to daily life in the neighborhood of Hillside.

Fraternal Codependence by Nicholas Napoletano exemplified for me the difference between seeing paintings in the virtual versus the physical world. Online, where the artist first came to my attention, his Caravaggian style looked derivative and dreary, whereas in person I found myself in awe of his technical mastery and unexpected stylistic approach to environmental issues, specifically the global increase of natural disasters.

Karisa Wilson. Photo: Kristin Anne Johnson. Venue: St. Cecilia Music Center.

In the basement of St. Cecilia Music Center, a series of listening stations played this year’s music entries. It was here that I discovered Michgan-born recording artist Karisa Wilson. Her indie folk song “Stronger” came to my mind several times during ArtPrize as being something I’d like to hear again and again. Wilson is the latest edition to my iTunes library.

Jennifer Cronin, "Untitled no. 1 (from the peculiar manifestation of paint in my life)," 2010. Oil on canvas, 3' x 6' x 1'. Venue: Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Standing in front of Jennifer Cronin’s Untitled no.1 was like watching a suspense thriller. You, the viewer, know what is happening while the character is unaware and vulnerable to the threat of this black cloud floating over her body. Cronin took a risk here. The thick strokes of paint look carelessly applied against the detailed setting; it looks as if the artist planned to destroy her work and then changed her mind. But what this suggests is that Cronin is in some way haunted by her own painting practice.

Ji Lee, "Pieces of Mind," 2011. Photo: Jay Freeman. Venue: UICA.

Produced by Ji Lee, Pieces of Mind was not about his little Buddhas as much as it was about his larger goal of engaging the people and architecture of Grand Rapids. One reason Lee’s project was a favorite of mine is because it was so well matched to ArtPrize where people are already encouraged to go out and hunt for art, converse about their findings, and hopefully gain new perspectives.

What was in your top ten? I encourage you to share in the comment box below.

This video, produced by Brian Kelly, was shown at the ArtPrize 2011 Winners Announcement. The music is “I Got a Thing” by Hanni el Khatib.

The level of engagement was record-setting. At a time when many are drawn to professional or college sports, or other events, hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and from all backgrounds sought out their favorite works and voted. Jurors, experts in their field, came from across the country, to select the works they felt best represented a particular category. Together we explored the tension between public and professional in an open dialog.

In all, 18 winners were awarded nearly $500,000, with the top prize of $250,000 going to Mia Tavonatti of Santa Ana, Calif., for her mosaic, Crucifixion.

The conversation was epically epic. Made possible by the voters, our partners, the artists and the venues. Thank you for your commitment. Together we are creating a place where engaging with art and engaging with each other is valued. Because of you, no other event is like this in the world.

Together, let’s congratulate all of our 1,582 artist participants, including our winners:

Popular Vote

• Mia Tavonatti, Santa Ana, Calif. Crucifixion
• Tracy Van Duinen, Chicago, Ill., Metaphorest
• Lynda Cole, Ann Arbor, Mich. Rain
• Laura Alexander, Columbus, Ohio, The Tempest II
• Paul Baliker, Palm Coast, Fla., Ocean Exodus
• Ritch Branstrom, Rapid River, Mich., “Rusty” A sense of direction/self portrait
• Sunti Pichetchaiyakul, Big Fork, Mont., President Gerald Ford Visits ArtPrize
• Robert Shangle, Sparta, Mich., Under Construction
• Bill Secunda, Butler, Pa., Mantis Dreaming
• Llew (Doc) Tilma, Wayland, Mich., Grizzlies on the Ford

Juried Awards

• Two-Dimensional — Mimi Kato, St. Louis, Mo., One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town
• Three-Dimensional — Michelle Brody, New York, N.Y., Nature Preserve
• International — Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, Cincinnati, Ohio, DISAPPEARANCES – an eternal journey
• Time-Based — Caroline Young, Chicago, Ill., Remember:Replay:Repeat
• Urban Space — Catie Newell, Detroit, Mich., Salvaged Landscape
• Sustainability — Laura Milkins, Tucson, Ariz., Walking Home: stories from the desert to the Great Lakes
• Ox-Bow Residency — Evertt Beidler, Portland, Ore., Progressive Movement(s)
• Venue — SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, Mich.

Glenn Harper is editor of Sculpture magazine, and formerly editor of Art Papers. He visited ArtPrize earlier this week to present in the Speaker Series, as well as to determine the winner of the award for 3D, a category that includes nearly 600 entries. In the following interview, I ask Harper a few questions about sculpture, technology, and ArtPrize in general.

Nicole J. Caruth: I was just reading your article Is Sculpture Dead? There’s a question that you asked in piece that said, to paraphrase, if sculpture is dead and everything is permitted, does anything count? I feel like that gets at one of the questions here, which is, if anyone can call their self an artist and call their work art, whatever it may be, does it really matter what the results of the top ten are? Does it matter when it’s really, supposedly, about the dialogue that takes place around art? Does it matter that the top ten looks – well, however it looks?

Glenn Harper: I think everything is permitted but not everything is convincing. Because there’s not a movement or a fixed set of ideas that artists have to deal with, an artist has to make a case for what they’re doing, because nobody else is going to do it. Whether they’re a professional artist or not, anybody who is making work and putting it in the public, trying to initiate a dialogue, has to set the conditions for what they’re doing are. They have to make a case for it as sculpture if it’s sculpture. They have to make a case for it as art, because there’s no mutually agreed definition for what art is. And an artist who is successful in this sort of media is someone who is able to make a work stand out and communicate on its own without the viewer having any particular foreknowledge of art or any fixed notion of what the thing is that they’re looking at.

NC: Has what you just outlined been hard to find at ArtPrize?

GH: No, there were several pieces as we went around. Actually the first couple of places we were in, as I was being guided around, there were some things that I thought were interesting. I was waiting for something to knock me out of my shoes and it was about halfway through my total tour before I saw something that was doing that for me. And I wasn’t making a decision ahead of time, but I was confident at that point that there would be something I’d be comfortable awarding the prize too.

One of the discussions we’ve been having since I’ve been here is how to give artists the jurors and the public recognized as valuable, but who were not prize-winners, some kind of recognition for what they achieved in their work. There were some things that I saw here that I could have given a prize to, and there were artists whose contact information I’m taking with me because I want to follow what they’re doing in the future. So maybe the conversation may continue with not only jurors like me, but also the public who has had a glimpse of these people. When they see them again they will recognize and see how they’re continuing to evolve their work, and continue the conversation. Any time it’s possible for artists to catch somebody’s attention, there’s a value in that.

NC: I heard you were skeptical of ArtPrize before you got here, and I’m curious what your reservations were and after your experience this week, what your thoughts are now?

GH: I don’t know about skeptical. We covered ArtPrize in the magazine last year. The points that we were most interested in in the article are reinforced by being here, which is the huge participation. Getting people interested in art is one of the most interesting aspects of the whole program, getting the large numbers of participants. If the top ten isn’t necessarily what I would have picked, it’s still interesting to see how the public is interacting and what they’re choosing.

I did a short list based on what I could see from the website before I got here, just as things I wanted to make sure that I saw, and there were actually a couple of things on my short list in the top ten. So I’m not necessarily dubious about the choices. It will be interesting to see what the winner is.

Just as a personal thing, and I’ve said this to some of the people at ArtPrize, I would encourage the prizes to be more leveled out so that it was not such a big drop-off after the first three of the popular vote winners and the rest of the awards.

I was reading some of the artists’ own blogs that I was referred to after seeing their work here, and the artists themselves are expressing an interest in winning something here, even if it’s not the top prize. That recognition in this kind of venue will mean something to people. Which is why I think there’s some interest among some of the people who’ve participated in making possible some recognition that may not even be associated with money; which ones are voted highest in the various venues, or which ones were on various jurors’ short lists or something. It might encourage artists to see that people were responding to their work, and also give them something to talk about on their resume. Everybody has ideas about what ArtPrize should be. I’m offering my two-cent’s worth just like everybody else.

NC: I haven’t fully formulated this question but with that said, I think this event and the way it’s organized is very much born of our culture today, with people voting by way of their phones and social media, and there’s this fundamental desire for different communities to interact with art on different levels. I’m curious where you see sculpture, or the future of looking at sculpture, where social media is concerned.

GH: There’s an old story about a painter in the 1950s who defined sculpture as what you trip over when you back up to look at a painting. That’s not true any more, but there’s a truth in that, because it is something you trip over. It’s something that lives in the same space you do. It has a tactile quality and a physical quality that isn’t as much there in a painting and certainly not as much in an online media.

So I think of sculpture, speaking broadly – and we define sculpture pretty broadly – as offering a kind of 180-degree different experience from interacting in social media or looking at stuff online. I think any kind of art really doesn’t give you in a reproduction or an online photo what the work itself is like. There’s a lot of painting that if you see it online, when you see it in person it’s a totally different experience. That’s definitely true with sculpture.

But at the same time there are things going on now with social media that are very interesting with regard to sculpture, like QR codes. People are posting QR codes on their work and with public work that allow a viewer to interact more deeply with the work or its story or what the artist has done elsewhere.

A lot of public art in the past has been unlabeled even, or if it’s labeled, it gives you a title and an author but doesn’t give you any more information than that. So social media and new media and new opportunities like QR codes give the public a way to know more but also interact more, as a QR code is not necessarily just a passive thing. And new media is certainly going to be developed to make it possible to encounter a work in a physical space and interact with other people or the artist or the person who put it in that space, whether it’s a public agency or private developer or whoever. So everything, including social media and the physical world is going to be a continuum, a continuous back and forth.