Grand Rapids Art Prize 2012

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, they hold a big open to everybody art contest, and they let the public vote on the winners. You can peruse photographs of the entries here.

There are over a thousand in all, but I yesterday I was incapacitated by illness and so bored that I scrolled through the whole thing and clicked on about a hundred thumbnails. It was interesting, in a way, a tour of the lower wrung of professional art in America. There is much that makes me hope the artists are 16, and a fair amount of religious schlock. Lots of junk sculpture -- sculpture made from found metal bits has penetrated more deeply into the American folk mind than any other sort of modern art. These are Chained Dream by Jim Pallas, one of what he says is a series of "moon works," and Junk Yard Music Box by Tom Kaufmann, a "human powered automated musical instrument made entirely from recycled materials."

There are works that seems like good ideas but are clumsily executed, a category in which I would place the above, Stick-to-it-ive-ness, by Richard Morse, installed in the Grand River. Semi-abstract horses running on water is such a fine notion that some city with a river should commission a better version from a sculptor who can make steel flow. And of course there are other artists with skill or energy but nothing much to say.

At the top, a photograph of reflections in melting snow by Dennis Nielsen, Staring Below to See Above,  which I like very much. Above, Trees, by Karin Nelson, a woman who taught herself to paint in her 50s and ended up as a feature on the local tv news, as she proudly tells us.

Above, Autumn Leaves II by Randi Ford, a nice example of style for which (as my regular readers know) I have a great weakness. Below, Dragon, by Robin Protz, a work made of buttons suspended on thread by woman who is, she says, not much like the typical artist.