Fountain Street Church and ACLU partner for 'Art to Change the World'

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 LEGAL NEWS PHOTO BY CYNTHIA PRICE

 

by Cynthia Price
Legal News

 

If your ambition is to present art that inspires social change, the resulting controversy could have some negative consequences, as organizers of the ArtPrize venue at Fountain Street Church learned.

So it was with an apparent response to “Erase,” a large-scale pencil drawing of an assault rifle which artist Greg Bokor invited members of the public to erase by using pink erasers imprinted with names of the dead in school massacres, from Columbine to Newtown.

On the first Saturday of ArtPrize the drawing was opened up to erasure and all but a faint outline was gone by Saturday afternoon. The next Monday church staff found a Greek phrase scrawled across the front of the church. Though the culprits have not been identified, the phrase is common among pro-gun advocates.

As Paul Arnold, who chairs the church’s ArtPrize Task Force, noted, the artist himself intended his work not to be anti-gun but anti-violence.

The drawing itself was meticulously done. One very young visitor Friday, before its erasure, told her mother, “This is the one that really wows me.”

The judges for Art to Change the World’s prizes, intended to number only two — one each from collaborators, the American Civil Liberties Union West Michigan Branch and  the Fountain Street Social Action Committee — voted to give “Erase” a special award.

Judges Tom Clinton, an attorney/artist who serves on the ACLU West Michigan Advisory Board (and is himself associated with Site:Lab) and Diana Sieger of Grand Rapids Commu-

nity Foundation chose “Problem Girls” by Steven Hansen for the ACLU award. The complex three-dimensional collage explores the ways in which “the gaze of men” and manipulative advertising can shape the way women are viewed.

Judging on behalf of the Social Action Committee were David Rosen, president of Kendall College of Art and Design, and Cathy Marashi, assistant director of the Grand Valley State  Art Gallery. They awarded a work by a Kosovo artist, Agim Rudi, which was actually a sketch for a sculpture.

Paul Arnold explains that they originally intended to use the actual sculpture, but shipping it from Kosovo proved too expensive. But the meaning of the work, expressing the “internal scream” people feel as they cry out against injustice and evil, came through even in the sketch.

This is the third year of the collaboration, and organizers invited back many of the artists from previous years. They also reviewed the broad range of potential ArtPrize submissions.

“Erase” is by no means the only controversial piece.  A series of black-and-white photos containing naked bodies and breasts have elicited shocked comments, Arnold says, but such commenters seem to have been distracted from observing that the photos are of a transgendered couple.

In the small room under the church’s bell tower, an installation called “Broken” features small dolls in cages, a bed with bloody palm prints and handcuffs, gray mannequins, and a woman in red looking at her reflection in a shattered mirror to excite discussion about human trafficking. The name comes from artists Susan Clinthorne’s and Sally Thielen’s observation that the word for prostitute in Cambodian is translated as “Broken.” Arnold says that Fountain Street churchgoers who have young children have expressed some discomfort with the disturbing images, so he covers parts of the exhibit every time there is a church service.

Arnold, a graphic designer who owns Paul Arnold Design, explains that the selection process was difficult because the collaborating curators wanted each artwork on display to have both artistic merit and social justice content.

Judging from the response, the selection committee was successful. “We feel really good about the exhibit,” he says.

Task force member and Social Action Committee Chair Tom Logan, who in July ended a six-year stint as the West Michigan ACLU?branch president, agrees. “I think it’s a strong exhibit,” he says. He referred to a sculptural exhibit in front of the church by Timothy Burke, who reused parts of the former Detroit J.L. Hudson’s building in the tradition of Detroit’s famous Heidelberg open-air art project (at which he also exhibits) to fashion an anti-war message. Logan reminisced about visiting the project years ago and running across its founding artist, Tyree Guyton, “puttering around doing gardening.” Logan adds, “I guess the whole project kind of tugs at me.”

Another task force member, Ed Wong-Ligda, is also on the ACLU advisory board, and an artist himself.

 

 

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