Vis Ed

Six inch surveys are back! In each, an artist tells you a bit about themselves through their responses and handwriting.

Aude Shattuck is a local illustrator who can be found on Instagram, twitter, and Patreon as and at https://audeshattuck.carbonmade.com/about.

Last night was wonderful! I gave an abbreviated version of my How to Look at Art presentation at UICA's Off The Wall event. The crowd responded thoughtfully about the themes of each artwork: civil rights, apathy, ritual, honor, and more. If you would like to bring this presentation to your office, school, religious institution, etc., visit vised.net/workshops to learn more and get in touch.

Tomorrow’s the night! I’ll be leading a “how to look at contemporary art” presentation at UICA's inaugural Off The Wall event. Other performances include improv group Funny Girls, opera singer Grace VanHoven, and Dance in the Annex - DITA Tickets are on sale at www.uica.org and at the door.

Image: David Mahawili. "Iodine Sky". April 2018.
Credit: UICA

Flex Gallery is on the front page of Temporary Art Review!

Check out their profile at the link below. Work by Grand Rapids artists Jenn Schaub, Jeen Na, Greg Oberle, and Briana Trudell are all featured as well.

http://temporaryartreview.com/

To prepare for my “How to Look at Art” presentation at UICA's first ever Off The Wall event (5/15), I went on a tour at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. It’s always educational to see how someone else leads viewers through an art experience. Thanks for a nice tour, KIA.

Tonight’s the night! All five armbands of the 2018 season of Flex Gallery will be roaming around First Fridays from 6-9 on the Avenue for the Arts and at the Opening Reception: Color of the Year Presented by X-Rite Pantone at UICA. White Cube Backpack, Grand Rapids’ other mobile art gallery, will be there as well.

Maddie May is a two-time Flex Gallery participant who also runs Bend Gallery on Grand Rapids’ Avenue for the Arts. In wrapping up this season of Flex Gallery I asked her, “what would our city look like if artists were fully supported?”

She answered, “If our artists were fully supported in our city, a lot of our sustainability issues with entertainment would be solved. We have a big boom of interest in art during Art Prize and Festival for the Arts, but for the rest of the year coverage of and public interest in art is low. It’s frustrating. Our city honestly lacks in jobs for creatives; it expects creatives to do work for free or seriously underpays them for what they do. These are issues that exist most everywhere, but I believe Grand Rapids has a special advantage in dealing with them. I think if organizations put more resources into hiring artists and creatives there could be magnificent problem solving and economic stimulation [throughout the city]. Another thing I’d love to see more of are opportunities for grants and residencies locally. It would be amazing to see our local arts organizations and patrons funding things like these. With the right resources for artists I think we’d see a Grand Rapids community that is engaging with its city through its creative population and the businesses, organizations, and entertainment it creates.”

With this year’s season of Flex Gallery coming to a close, I asked artist Briana Trudell about an art viewing experience that personally changed her life.

She replied, “One way that viewing art has positively impacted my life is when I was in college the photography students took a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago where we were allowed to go into the archives. Walking in those archives and seeing the rows and rows and rows of art that was being kept in a freezer made me want to make art that people could touch, interact with and experience. It made me want to make art that would never be kept in the dark and made me appreciate art that is interactive and experiential.”

This rings true when thinking about “Ask”, the armband she created for me, inspired by having her hair touched by strangers and the movement. For the 2 weeks that I wore her band, I had 5 people touch it without asking versus 4 who asked.

There’s a new mobile art gallery in town! At the Avenue for the Arts in March I got to see Megan Galvin’s latest project, White Cube Backpack. Megan is a visual studies student at GVSU who is deeply involved with the Grand Rapids art community. We’ll be back with new work at April First Fridays (4/6). See you then.

This week I’m wearing the work of Joseph Kraft, a Chicago-based artist whose playful, intuitive style translates seamlessly between sculptures, drawings, and functional objects. Earlier this morning I put on his armband after getting a CT scan at and the technician was very curious about it. “The shapes reminded me of Pokémon for a second,” she said. “My son is in 2nd grade, and it’s inescapable.”

A brand new armband by Jeen Na inspired by memories of his childhood in Virginia and of his grandmother’s flower shop in Busan, South Korea.

So far people have been swooning over it left and right when I've worn it at work. Today was the first day I took it out on the street for my bike commute.

Last month Flex gallery traveled overseas for the first time. Pictured here are armbands by three Grand Rapids artists, Angelica Hay, Megan Roach, and Brianna Trudell in Paris, Lille, and Roubaix, France, respectively.