Four graduate students from the sculpture program in Indiana University's Department of Studio Art have been working all summer creating art works that are being installed in an abandoned house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Inside Outside is a showcase of the work of Amelia Volwiler-Stanley, the team of Dan Woerner and Kate Burnet, James Kidd, and Matthew Falvey. They are four of the 1473 artists showing at 171 venues in Grand Rapids from September 21st through October 9th and competing for $500,000 at ArtPrize 2016.
ArtPrize describes itself as a "radically open international art competition decided by public vote and expert jury." In its eighth year, the event has been recognized as the most attended public art event on the planet by The Art Newspaper, and recognized as "one of the 52 places to go in 2016" by The New York Times. The event attracts approximately 400,000 visitors over 19 days.
"The problem with contemporary art in our current moment is that art is just way too easy to ignore," explains Kevin Buist, the Director of Exhibitions for ArtPrize. "There's no reason that people have to pay attention to it. It's not normally part of a national conversation.
"So, at least for two and a half weeks, in our city, we decided to make art impossible to ignore. It permeates everything, and people are more or less forced to confront it."
Occupy Rumsey Street
"I think it's hard to ignore 15-foot inflatable sculptures coming out of a two-story house," jokes Dan Woerner, one of four grad students from IU creating work for this year's competition. Along with his wife and artistic partner Kate Burnet, Dan has created an installation for an abandoned house in a rundown neighborhood in Grand Rapids.
Woerner and his IU sculpture colleaguesVolwiler-Stanley, Kidd, and Falveyhave used the dilapidated house in the Rumsey St. neighborhood as their canvas. ArtPrize is known for its unorthodox venues, as Buist explains
Some of these places are what you'd expect. Art museum, galleries, independent curators taking over a warehouse space temporarily. But there's also a whole lot of other venues including things like city parks, churches, people's front yards, bank lobbies, restaurants, an insurance company, an auto repair shop. We've had a laundromat, almost anything you can imagine that's in this three-square mile area of downtown. If they want to, they can sign up and host artists for Art Prize.
One of the groups that has consistently found venues for artists to use during Art Prize, and beyond, is Site: Lab. For the last two years, the all-volunteer group, which organizes site-specific art projects in Grand Rapids, has partnered with Habitat for Humanity to make use of a group of ten buildings on a city block just south of downtown that have been condemned. They have awarded one of these Rumsey Street Project houses to the IU sculptors to use for Art Prize. In 2017, Habitat will raze the structures and construct low-income housing there.
In the meantime, the artists have moved in.
The artists gathered to discuss their projects, and the delicate balance between artmaking and urban renewal. Listen to the conversation above.