Coloring Outside The Lines

When you try to confine it in a box even as large as three square miles, art will spill outside the lines like a toddler coloring with a first carton of crayons.

In the same way, an organization called ArtPeers is extending the spirit of the ArtPrize beyond the competition’s boundaries of downtown Grand Rapids to include venues and artists in the Uptown area.

ArtPrize has attracted the attention of more than 750 artists worldwide with its offer of $450,000 in prize money to turn the core city into a massive art gallery for two weeks starting Sept. 23, but its boundaries don’t venture past the northwest corner College and Wealthy streets.

A few blocks to the east, ArtPeers is planning to hold art showings during the first weekend of ArtPrize in about a dozen shops and businesses in the hopes of giving a ” fuller picture of art in Grand Rapids,” says Erin Wilson, director of the Wealthy Theatre and a founding member of the organization.

“We like to think of it as working in concert with ArtPrize, kind of a timely synchronicity,” says Michael Knorr, owner of The Sparrows coffee shop at 1035 Wealthy SE and an advisory member to ArtPeers.  The Sparrows will serve as one of the ArtPeers venues.

Knorr and Wilson say their grassroots effort began in earnest after ArtPrize was announced  in April and some Uptown establishments asked whether the boundaries would be flexible enough to cover their area.  Uptown is a collection of five neighborhoods and four commercial districts surrounding Fulton and Wealthy streets extending from downtown Grand Rapids to Aquinas College.

When it appeared likely that Uptown wouldn’t be included in the competition, “we came up with the idea that we could  do this together, with the neighborhood alliance and  the neighborhood businesses all in Uptown,” Wilson says.  Local First and the Community Media Center are in-kind sponsors of the organization as well.

“We don’t want to be to a counter ArtPrize,” Knorr emphasized. “That’s not our goal. We love ArtPrize.”

At the Root of Art 
Wilson, Knorr and his wife Lori, and Ryan VanderMeer are about as grassroots a group as they come.

At an “executive” board meeting last week at The Sparrows, the three men brainstorm over laptops and  coffee of all the possibilities.  ArtPeers has been registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a community organization, VanderMeer reports, and Wilson says that the artists’ survey is ready to be launched.

A lot has happened during the past few months — purchase of a domain name, survey of businesses interested in participating as a venue, the launch of a website, beginning work on the history of art in Uptown. And while there is a lot yet to do, it doesn’t deter the trio from cooking up new ideas.

“This is something we all wanted, now it just has a name,” says Wilson, 38, who returned to West Michigan a few years ago after spending a number of years in New York City. “We originally wanted to encourage local artists to support their peers by attending one event a month,” he says. “It’s kind of an outgrowth of when we held events at the theater that I thought should have had more people attending.  Other cities have been better at this (peer support) than us. “

“I live around the corner from here, and I serve as the treasurer of the Wealthy Street Business Alliance,” explains VanderMeer, 24, co-owner of the Urban Pharm property management company and a Grand Rapids native.  “We had discussions about how great it would be to bring venues from ArtPrize into our area for the local artists.  So from my viewpoint, it’s strictly about strengthening the community.”

And for Knorr and his wife, it’s a lifelong commitment to the arts.

“Art is so integrated into my life that the coffee shop is almost an outgrowth of that,” Knorr says. “We saw this as a space where people could talk about their creative ideas and start acting on them.” Knorr, 29, has a bachelor’s in fine arts in sculpture from Kendall College of Art and Design, while Lori holds a bachelor’s in art education from Calvin College.

One Venue at a Time
Mostly through email contacts, the group has obtained venue commitments from businesses largely along Wealthy Street, although one business is located on Cherry.  Ironically, the organizers say there is a “sphere of influence” that defines ArtPeers as an Uptown event, though its boundaries are not set down in writing.

“There’s nothing preventing it from happening in another place in the city,” says Knorr. “For something like this to happen, you have to have enough venues in close proximity to participate  — a critical mass of people in the same place for it to work. Right now we only have influence among the people around us.”

Today marks the first day that artists can now enter information into ArtPeers’ website that allows them to be matched up with an appropriate venue.   The organization may need as many as three co-curators to match up appropriate venues with the art works, Knorr says, and the rules of engagement are being developed.

“We are going to try to have some coherence to the way that this is curated,” Wilson says.  The artworks will be on display at set times and dates that are tentatively scheduled to run from  Sept. 25-27, with a possible extension of the showings if public demand warrants it. “There will be a reliable set of hours for those three days that people will know they can view art, and the information will be available on Web-enabled phones so anyone can check the schedules easily.”

ArtPeers also plans to make use of applications on iPhones, Blackberries and other Web-enabled phones that allow the devices to read QR code or J-Tags at the art showings that then call up Web links and text files about artists and the venues. 

And the group hopes to post information on the history of art in Uptown that readers can build upon, like Wikipedia. “We feel that the past is also critical to understanding where we are now in Grand Rapids,” Wilson says.

The First Peers 
The first artists who apparently have fallen under the ArtPeers umbrella will be Catherine A. Herrman with her dance “Touching Peace,” and Ritsu Katsumata and Stafford Smith, who will be presenting “Fearscape.”  Both performing works of art will be unveiled Aug. 22 at the Wealthy Theatre at its Salmagundi event.  Wilson says the artists asked to use the theater as a venue when it was uncertain whether they could perform at an ArtPrize venue.  Both works have since been accepted to perform at the Old Federal Building during the competition.

Touching Peace will be performed at the Wealthy Theatre with seven dancers and a live symphony accompaniment as a tribute to Herrman’s family and friends who have succumbed to cancer.  Fearscape is a live duet between the husband and wife team of Katsumata playing the electric violin in concert with the digital camera work of Smith to address the climate of fear promoted by the mass media. 

While Salmagundi will happen before the official starts of either ArtPrize or ArtPeers, it will be a fitting artistic launch for its participants, Wilson says.

With only six weeks to go, “we are kind of building the track while the train is hurtling down the line,”Knorr says.  “But if someone is looking for something to put in a dining area, and they buy local art rather than something from a store like Pier 1, that right there makes it all worthwhile.”

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Matt Gryczan is the managing editor of Rapid Growth.