Art for the common man

In much of America, critics decide what is “art,” but in Grand Rapids, Mich., each year, ordinary folks also get a vote. This year’s sixth annual ArtPrize competition attracted 1,536 entries by artists hoping to win prize money. The pieces conveying compassion, hope, and grace won the affections—and votes—of many of the 41,000 viewers who cast nearly 400,000 votes for $260,000 in prize money. A panel of jurors appropriated another $300,000.

Carol Roeda’s “Color Out the Darkness” was one of 20 works that made it into the finals of the public vote grand prize competition. Twenty-five tubes, each 10 feet tall, formed a semicircle. Written in white on black panels on the exterior of the semicircle were quotes on suffering, hope, dark, and light—by St. Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, C.S. Lewis, and others. Inside the semicircle, the tubes burst with bright colors and stylized flowers. Roeda explained the theme on an accompanying brochure: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5”

Nicholas Kroeze’s three-dimensional display of a pond during a rainfall was also one of the 20 finalists for the public vote grand prize. Created with the help of his two sons and son-in-law, “The Pond” consists of wooden raindrops hung by clear filament from a 10-foot-tall hexagonal gazebo. Carved wooden ripples and splashes adorn the surface of a pond below. Kroeze, a former missionary in Mexico and current president of Kuyper College in Grand Rapids, said the carved “snapshot” of a pond during rainfall represents God’s common grace: “He sends His rain on all alike.”

Neither of those pieces won, though. For the first time in ArtPrize history, the same piece appealed both to the broad public and the professionals on the grand prize jury. Anila Quayyum Agha’s “Intersections” took home the grand prize in the public vote and shared it with Sonya Clark’s “The Haircraft Project” in the juried vote. The artist won $300,000 for her installation of a laser-cut wooden cube, suspended in a bare room and illuminated from within so that it cast floral and geometric shadows on the plain surfaces of the room in which spectators walked.

Agha, who grew up in Pakistan and teaches at Indiana University, drew her inspiration from the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the geometric patterns in Islamic art. Agha said she does not “subscribe to any organized religion” and that the piece is “not about Islam,” but that she drew from what’s familiar to her. She compared art to traveling: Both introduce people to the ideas and experiences of others.

Reflecting on ArtPrize, Kuyper College’s Kroeze said art is a “great way to find commonality. … You can appreciate everybody’s effort to try to communicate something of their sense of reality or their life experience.”

—Emily Scheie is a World Journalism Institute graduate