Naming names: My 10 favorite Grand Rapids artists
What started as a Facebook conversation became a challenge for three local arts lovers: Can you name your top 10 local artists? I answer my own question with this first article in the series.
“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.
