The work, now installed in the Grand River as part of ArtPrize 9, is designed as a way to spark conversation about immigration and the near-23 million displaced people around the world.

A+J Art and Design, a collaborative team based in Boston, are one of the recipients of the ArtPrize Featured Public Projects grants this year. Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier’s project will be one of two entries in the Grand River. As a way to highlight some of the stories behind the development of the dozens of projects that received grants this year, I decided to mail a small questionnaire to artists that we could then publish on the ArtPrize Blog. Ann and Jeremy responded by asking if we could have a longer conversation about their work and the shifting realities of immigration, which their work explores, as well as the political forces challenging the country — and even ArtPrize itself. I happily agreed.

For context, it’s relevant to note that we spoke on September 6, 2017, the day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that DACA would be rescinded, and in between Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kevin Buist: Tell me the story about how “SOS (Safety Orange Swimmers)” was first installed.

Ann Hirsch: There’s an event here [in Boston], an arts community has an open studio event every year, and they commission a public artwork for a channel off of Boston Harbor called Fort Point Channel. We put it in the water in October, when immigration was a very significant issue in the presidential campaign, but it wasn’t the only very significant issue. We felt deeply about it as children of immigrants, as my husband was recently naturalized, Jeremy is my husband and partner in the artwork. We are very close to immigration issues in our lives, so to hear some of the rhetoric around immigration attitudes in this country coming out some of the mouths in the run up to the election was extremely disturbing. And also at the time there were 21.3 million refugees in the world, and now it’s up close to 23 million. But at the time, it seemed clear that this was just going to pass. But yesterday, of course, there’s talk about ending DACA. All of those issues have become much more forefronted because they’re a big political wedge that’s dividing all of us. Immigration is an issue that’s the biggest wedge issue that we have right now. Our refugee policy has gotten thrown into the mix. I just think that, as you were saying, there’s a loss of optimism, it’s just hard… I don’t how to articulate this… It’s just hard.

KB: I know.

AH: I think coming together and being in a place where we can share our views and talk, whatever our positions are, that’s probably the most important thing. Without wanting to be overly bold about the work, I think at the very least one thing that “SOS (Safety Orange Swimmers)” is seeking to do is to at least open conversations about a predicament that is happening all over the world, as people look every which way. Something has to be done, nobody’s not affected. I think that a lot of people feel that way in Grand Rapids and all over the country and they’re not being heard right now. Not enough anyway.

KB: We were talking earlier about how I was observing that ArtPrize… It’s a strange phenomenon because ArtPrize is essentially the same as it has been for years, but there is a sense that the ground has shifted beneath it. The mood and the overall political context and tone of the country has changed from the last ArtPrize to this ArtPrize. It’s interesting to me that this work was first installed October of last year and now it will be reinstalled a year later. Talk about how you think that shift in political tone as well as the ongoing debates around immigration, how do you think that will change the reading of the work?

AH: That’s a complicated issue. I would first want to say that the actual body of water that we’re putting work in will totally change the piece because the previous installation was in a tidal channel. So the group of swimmers was constantly changing direction, sometimes they weren’t all facing the same way, they were moving towards and away from one another, they were always changing. It was a flexible situation. Now in the Grand River what we’ll see is the installation with all of the swimmers moving in one direction because the river is only moving in one direction. So the march of the piece will be… Well there was no feeling like that, it was changing, and now it seems like everything is vitrified a little bit with the piece. The crisis that we’re facing, it’s maybe mirroring that feeling. The piece will be mirroring the feeling of the vitrification of the issue.

KB: Right. A river instead of a tide.

AH: Yeah, exactly. The push in one direction, the swimmers are all kind of swimming up river. For us as artists one of the things that we saw people reacting to is the idea that the figures are almost like performers in a theatrical piece. A lot of people actually thought that they were real. They would say, ‘They should get out of the water, it must be cold.’ So there is this strange conflation with a performance piece with the sculpture installation. Thinking about how the piece is going to work in the Grand River, the idea that there actually isn’t going to be too much interaction and maybe that’s part of the work. We’re watching a spectacle unfolding and we’re actually not doing anything about it except taking pictures. Maybe that’s part of the new narrative of the piece.

KB: Yeah, there’s a certain powerlessness to that. But it’s true. The other thing that occurred to me, on this topic of how one work can be reinstalled and read differently, and going back to the news cycle that dominates everything, we’re talking right now in this moment in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and on the eve of Hurricane Irma, and I couldn’t help but think that the work — perhaps intentionally, perhaps not — seems to relate to flooding. Have you thought about that at all? I couldn’t help but read that into it, looking at it after looking at the news.

AH: No I hadn’t thought of that, Kevin. I [am thinking now] about how Harvey and Irma will create internally displaced people in this country, and that’s something that has an association with other countries outside the US. The idea of an internally displaced person, that’s actually what the storms are going to do, and are doing. Right, I hadn’t thought of that.

KB: It is related in a way, because immigration is really about displacement, right? It may not be a flood driving people out of North Africa and over the Mediterranean, but it’s displacement nonetheless. It’s all people seeking refuge because they can’t stay where they are.

AH: Exactly. You look at UNHCR numbers, I think they estimate that there are 65 million internally displaced people. 23 million refugees, then there are migrants that are more economically based migration issues. All of these issues are intertwined. When you think about what you hear in our current political climate it’s all about how we can’t let anybody in. If we hadn’t let people in, who would be here?

KB: Not me.

AH: I’m thinking a lot about… we’re working on another project here in Boston on a site in central Boston and talking about early inhabitants in Boston, and Native Americans. This entire area was settled for centuries and millennia by Native Americans, certainly the same is true in Grand Rapids. But when I think about immigration in Grand Rapids it’s really a very recent story, and it’s a very big, rapid story. We’re both interested to see how people respond to the work there, given how many people are new arrivals.

KB: Yeah, there are a lot. There’s a large Dutch community here, but that immigration story is mostly a few generations old now, and memories can be very, very short. People forget that even as they celebrate their Dutch heritage, they often can’t see the parallels. I was going to ask, what other projects have you guys been working on, and how do they relate to this one?

AH: The new piece we’re working on… Have you been to Boston?

KB: I haven’t, actually.

AH: It’s a smallish city. I came here from New York. It’s a small, very navigable city, very walkable and bikable city. We have a lot of Revolutionary War sites, of course. The project we’re working on is for North Square, which is where Paul Revere’s house still exists. So the piece, what it’s doing is taking the history of North Square over a broad course of time and looking at the different narratives that could be found in the square and creating separate sculptures based on those different narratives. We’re saying, this place doesn’t have a linear history, it doesn’t have one story to it, and it’s not the story of one group of people, it’s a whole lot of people over a long course of time. Part of the project is an extension of what I’ve been doing for the past year, which is working as an artist in residence in a local community center through the city of Boston. I’m making artwork with a community of non-art makers, collaborating on a series of works together. It’s really the first time I’ve done something like that and the community engagement experience I’ve had there is coming into the new project in North Square. It’s going to have some of the same things going on with it that “SOS Swimmers” does, where we’re blending digital approaches with traditional approaches.

The tide and the river: an interview with SOS (Safety Orange Swimmers) ArtPrize artist Ann Hirsch was originally published in culturedGR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Who are the best artists in Grand Rapids? I want names,” I wrote on Facebook recently.

At first, the responses were skeptical, incredulous, and — in one case — private. People seemed reluctant to name the names of the local artists they most admired. After a bit of prodding, the lists started pouring in. The post eventually amassed 70 comments, listing dozens, if not hundreds of artists. I knew a lot of the names, but plenty of them were new to me.

Reading the names gave me a sense of the breadth and depth of the artist community in Grand Rapids that I hadn’t sensed before. This was an odd feeling, because even though I knew well over half the artists listed, there was still a power in seeing them all written down.

My little Facebook experiment led to the idea for this post and several more to come. Below I’ve listed my 10 favorite artists who are currently based in Grand Rapids, and I’ve invited other writers to do the same, which will be published soon. I’m not collaborating with these other writers, so if one artist appears on more than one list, that’s evidence of some level of consensus emerging, it’s not planned.

Lists like this are risky, but that’s part of the point. Ten is not enough (my own quick first draft contained 20). Lists like this are also hopelessly subjective.

“Best according to who?” one commenter challenged on the Facebook post. In this case, best according to me, along with all of my biases and shortcomings. By putting an incomplete, subjective list on a public forum, I’m not claiming the authority to declare these artists are the best in any definitive way. Instead, I want the inadequacies of my list to be readily apparent. The cracks show, so that you, dear reader, can argue with me and tell me who are really the best artists in Grand Rapids.

So here’s my list in alphabetical order (in no other order or ranking system):

Kelly Allen

Kelly Allen is primarily a painter and textile artist. Over the last few years her work underwent a transition from tightly-rendered trompe l’oeil paintings that mimicked collage to much looser, goopy piles of color forming crude portraits and landscapes. I wrote about this evolution in a review of her recent show at UICA. The new paintings are great, and the old ones are good, too. It’s reassuring to see artists here not only making solid work, but also seriously challenging themselves even long after the critical crucible of grad school.

Rick Beerhorst

Rick Beerhorst has been making his signature brand of poetic, meticulous paintings and woodblock prints for years. His visual vocabulary is unmistakable — blending Eastern Orthodox iconography with American folk traditions — but he’s more than willing to push boundaries, creating a bespoke wagon that acts as the nexus of community projects.

Anna Campbell

Anna Campbell teaches at Grand Valley State University. Her sculptures and installations sample common objects and images, but transform their meaning, building alternate iconographies of gender and sexual identity. Her work manages to be dense, playful, and confrontational, all wrapped into precise conceptual and material choices.

Mandy Cano Villalobos

Mandy Cano Villalobos makes installations, drawings, and performances that use ritual and collected objects to explore cultural identity, place, and time. For one work, she’ll make intricate abstract drawings with pigs’s blood; for the next, she’ll stack a carefully sorted mountain of ephemera culled from an abandoned home.

[Has Heart] — Michael Hyacinthe and Tyler Way

[Has Heart] is a project that connects wounded veterans with artists and designers so they can collaborate on designs for t-shirts, boots, and other goods. I’m including Hyacinthe and Way on my list of top Grand Rapids artists because the work they’re doing is vital, and because they’re blurring categorical boundaries along the way. Is [Has Heart] an art collective, an art project, a business, or a charity? It’s all of the above.

Maureen Nollette

Maureen Nollette makes minimal, meditative installations, drawings, and paintings. Her work often uses intricate repeated gestures to create a finished product that’s both subtle and intense. Shadow, reflection, and imperfection take center stage. The work is quiet and powerful.

Julie Schenkelberg

Julie Schenkelberg is a regular collaborator with SiTE:LAB, most recently completing “Transmigration” for their 2016 ArtPrize show at Rumsey Street. For the project, the entire house was moved off its foundation and into an adjacent parking lot before she began slicing its walls, removing the siding, and intertwining ghostly white fabric. The house could have been altered in place, but moving it showed that the entire building was an object to be manipulated and re-contextualized.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco

Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s videos, photos, installations, and interactive projects deal with many dimensions of identity: racial, sexual, religious, and national. Songco is an artist who embarks on complicated projects that employ loaded signifiers, but he proceeds with playfulness and humility, offering reflections on how these journeys unfold.

Norwood Viviano

Norwood Viviano works primarily in glass. He has made several bodies of work that use as a starting point the curved line on a graph of a city’s population over time. He takes this line, turns it on its side, combines it with its mirror image, then uses this odd symmetrical shape as a pattern to create a glass vessel. The objects are beautiful and surprisingly informative. There’s a poetry as well. What’s a city if not a container for people, each with its own character?

Natalie Wetzel

Natalie Wetzel runs a multidisciplinary performance space, studio, residency, and creative hub called The Moon with photographer Mark Andrus. She makes insane kaleidoscopic costumes and sculptures, performs with bands at music festivals, produces music videos, and the list goes on. Her output seems unedited and manic, and it’s all the better for it.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three part series, “Naming names,” in which local art lovers dare to create a Top 10 list of artists in Grand Rapids. All three submitted their lists at the same time without sharing with each other who they put on their lists.

Read day two’s Top 10 list by Yolanda Gonzalez here.
Read day three’s Top 10 list by Tom Duimstra here.
Read our editor’s assessment of responses to the series here.

Naming names: My 10 favorite Grand Rapids artists was originally published in culturedGR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For her part in “Coming Home,” UICA’s current show of eight Michigan artists, Kelly Allen presents a few dozen small paintings and textile wall hangings that are packed with slapstick humor, riotous color, and an exuberant playfulness with materials. The canvases include small portraits made of thick, goopy plastisol ink in hallucinogenic palettes. There are larger works with dense piles of color, rendered in swirling oils, that read as landscapes. Fiber works burst with kaleidoscopic rags, beads, mirrors, and bits of clay, looking like tribal artifacts from a distant future.

In her statement for the show, Allen describes the work as the result of a shift in her practice. For years, she made paintings that used precise photorealistic rendering to mimic collaged elements — animals, objects, textures — on stark white backgrounds. The old works were energetic, dense, and candy-colored. I always liked those earlier paintings, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that using such precise control of paint to imitate the appearance of collage was a disservice to the material realities of both collage and painting. Collage is a method of stealing bits of existing images and building something new from the waste of visual culture. Painting, on the other hand, is about pigment, binder, surface, gesture, and time. What can an artist do on a surface with pigment, a solution with which to bind it, the movement of her body, and time? Every painting is an answer to that question. As much as I liked Allen’s old work, I couldn’t figure out why her answer to that question was to produce something that looked like collage.

Thankfully, she moved on, and the results are thrilling. In her statement, Allen describes a shift from using store bought art supplies to reclaimed materials. This seems less important than the way in which Allen’s change in painterly approach demonstrates that she switched sides in an ancient war: the fight between line and color. A contentious debate has raged since at least the time of Plato, with line and its attendant concepts — logic, rationality, philosophy — on one hand; and color and its fellows — emotion, intuition, rhetoric — on the other. The conflict flared in the 17th century French Academy when the battle lines were drawn (no pun intended) between the Poussinists and the Rubenists. The Poussinists, revering Nicolas Poussin’s precise renderings of historical scenes, believed in the Platonic notion that the mind contained immutable ideal forms that could be reconstructed by artists through reason. Line, therefore, was the essence of painting, color was merely decoration added after the important work was done.

The Rubenists, on the other hand, admired Peter Paul Rubens’ vibrant chromatic canvases. The Rubenists believed that color was the most important thing in painting because it could best imitate nature. Color was admired for its ability to enchant and deceive. Drawing, as an exercise in rationality, appealed only to a small coterie of experts, while color was a direct experience and its immediacy was open to anyone. While the Poussinists looked back to Plato, the Rubenists read contemporaries like John Locke, who argued that all ideas were derived from experience. Eventually, the Rubenists won control of the Academy, but the battle never really went away.

Kelly Allen received her MFA in 2008 from Kendall College of Art and Design. It’s a big generalization to make — and odd considering the cultural, political, and technological revolutions that have occurred since the 17th century — but I’ll make the claim anyway: Kendall tends to produce Poussinists. Allen, along with many of her fellow alumni, is a stellar draughtswoman. For years she produced images that were vibrant and dynamic, but seemed to exhibit her mastery of rendering and composition above all else. They were good, but they were careful.

No more. With these new paintings, Allen is drunk on color, and the only way to really see what she’s up to is through direct experience with color in all of its shifting, chaotic, deceptive power. Line is definite, measurable, and stable, and—too often — a crutch. Whenever an artist renders something with a precise line, we can’t help but compare it to the real thing, the verisimilitude becomes a proxy for quality. Is the painting good? Well, does it look like what it looks like? Letting a painting be intoxicated by color, however, completely denies the viewer this safe and rational approach. The only way to really see the painting is to take the pill and brace for the trip. There’s no sense in holding up a photo and darting your eyes back and forth to assess proportion, value, and hue. Your eyes are on their own.

There’s a painting in the show where the battle between Allen’s Poussinist and Rubenist impulses is clearly on view. “Garden 1,” from 2013, is a small canvas with an undulating mass of pistachio, periwinkle, gray, and hot pink surging from the bottom over a white ground. In the upper right and lower left are two bees hovering next to this alien aberration of a flower. The bees are life-sized and depicted with startling precision. They are two tiny visitors from Allen’s past, buzzing in the air around an incomprehensible mass of color, failing to find a place to land. This blending of old and new approaches on a single canvas works because she only does it once. If more of the paintings used this trick, it would get old. As it stands, “Garden 1” reads like a crucial pivot from one method of image making to another. Are there photorealistic faux-collage renderings under that swirling mass of color?

We’ll never know.

Letting color riot: On Kelly Allen’s paintings in UICA’s “Coming Home” was originally published in culturedGR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The cover story of the new GQ is a feature on Beyoncé. Of course everyone is talking about the photos, but read the article. Trust me, read it. I wish it were six or seven times longer.

The part that really got me thinking was the description of how she documents all of her experiences and interactions. She keeps a hi-tech scrapbook of all her recordings, photos, videos, press, etc., which is not that weird, but it goes on...

Beyoncé's inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a "visual director" Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay's "Yellow" to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC's library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it'll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.
And this room—she calls it her "crazy archive"—is a key part of that, she will explain, so, "you know, I can always say, 'I want that interview I did for GQ,' and we can find it." And indeed, she will be able to find it, because the room in which you are sitting is rigged with a camera and microphone that is capturing not just her every utterance but yours as well. These are the ground rules: Before you get to see Beyoncé, you must first agree to live forever in her archive, too.

What's going on here? The article goes on to tell how over the course of her career Beyoncé has learned to take control of her image, her art, and the revenue it generates. Compiling a complete archive of herself is certainly part of that, but it seems like there's something more.

At first, the idea of collecting such an archive seems insane, or at least profoundly narcissistic. But is it? There are archives being created of each of us all the time. Some of them we know about (Twitter, Facebook, Medium), and others we don't (search histories, cookies, spyware, etc.)

There are a few things that are unique about the digital archive of Beyoncé's life compared to yours and mine. For one thing, it's professionally produced. Take a look at her Tumblr. It's full of breezy, Instagram-esque travel photos, funky poses, and arty snapshots, but it's also just a little too perfect. When I look at it, I always wonder who all the other people around her are. Exactly how big is that entourage? And how many people are there to document things? How much editing happens to produce these perfectly spontaneous glimpses of her life?

The Crazy Archive also sounds very big. Thinking about 16 hours of footage a day since 2005 (which is over 40,000 hours of footage) makes the Tumblr seem like the polished tip of a very, very big iceberg. It's almost awe-inspiring.

Perhaps the most important way that the Crazy Archive is different from yours and mine is that Beyoncé owns it. It’s not a surprise that that candid photos and dishy stories about celebrities have a monetary value. That's not new. What is new is that our stories and images are also valuable. When we create our digital archives, knowingly or not, we're creating intellectual property that has an exchange value. You post photos to Facebook, I want to look at them, and that desire creates a space that can be sold to someone trying to sell something to me. Your archive is valuable, but you're not the one getting paid when it gets sold.