MichiganRadio

What's That Red Blob Thing Outside City Hall? GRAND RAPIDS, MI (Michigan Radio) - If you're not from Grand Rapids, you could drive by it a hundred times and barely notice. It's a massive blob of red steel just outside the stoic black tower of city hall. An abstract sculpture, and to an untrained eye, it looks just about like every other abstract steel sculpture in every other city in America.

But this sculpture, by Alexander Calder, is different. For one thing, Calder is a big deal. He invented mobiles, so if you've ever used one to put your baby to sleep, you have him to thank. His sculpture in Grand Rapids, "La Grande Vitesse" is not a mobile. But it is significant in the world of art because it is the first public work to ever get funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nancy Mulnix-Tweddale led the charge to get the Calder installed 40 years ago.

"It was tough to get it here," she says. "It was two years and a lot of controversy. Someone shot out my living room window the day of the dedication"

She tells me this as we stand next to the sculpture, during the Fiesta Mexicana. In nice weather, there's always a festival here. The sculpture is rarely alone.

But in the late '60s, the city had a very different attitude toward art.

"The city always held the arts at bay," Mulnix-Tweddale says. "They were in terrible trouble 42 years ago. The symphony had no paid musicians. The art museum was a fire trap of an old building."

And the Calder sculpture wasn't exactly embraced at first. But now it's an emblem of the city. It shows up in the city's official logo. There's even a cab company in town called Calder City Taxi.

The Calder, and the effort it took to get it to Grand Rapids, changed how the city viewed art.

"You can't really overstate the importance of the Calder, it was a tremendous landmark in the history of art for the city, says Celeste Adams, the head of the Grand Rapids Art Museum. She says after the Calder was installed, people in the city continued to try to pull in important artists.

In 1973, the city hosted an event called "Sculpture Off The Pedestal." It featured pieces from an emerging area of sculpture, sometimes called Earthworks or Land Art. The idea was to make sculpture part of the natural surroundings. Today, some of that sculpture remains, though you'd hardly notice. One piece consists of two asphalt paths that criss-cross as they climb up a hill.

Another work that sometimes escapes notice is right in front of the art museum. To most people, Rosa Parks Circle is just a park. But it's a park that was designed by the sculptor Maya Lin, who's best known for making the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall.

Sometimes people in town don't notice these sculptures, but they have gotten attention in rest of the art world.

"I think of Grand Rapids as a really intriguing case study for people who are interested in public art," says Patricia Phillips, dean of graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She's studied public art, and says Grand Rapids isn't on the same level as New York or Chicago. But the diversity of its public art over time, from the Calder to the Maya Lin, is unique.

"So you actually, in a very interesting way, you have these very different kind of representative positions about what public art is and what it contributes to a city," Phillips says.

And now comes ArtPrize. The works in ArtPrize aren't necessarily public. But they will engage the public in a new way, by allowing people to vote on what they see. And much of the work will exist in public places.

Celeste Adams of the Grand Rapids Art Museum says ArtPrize may prove to mark another historic moment for the city.

"After ArtPrize has passed, it's remembered as an event," she says. "And we need to recognize that artistic events are sometimes as important as monuments."

ArtPrize starts today and officially ends on October 10th.

Contact Dustin Dwyer at dtdwyer@umich.edu.


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