September 28, 2011
ArtPrize Cathedral Square Review
A community not so far away;
Cathedral Square
By: me
ArtPrize has the tendency to bring out the child in all people, whether they are an actual 8 years old or 60 doesn’t make a difference. Art for the sake of art is hard to come by and usually with an event of ArtPrize size there is no keeping out the under appreciators who cannot see the beauty in a non-traditional piece or place.
A question that comes up a lot for first time Artprize goers is, ‘Where in the world are we supposed to start?” With art to see everywhere it is easy to get sweep away in the spectacle of it all and miss the smaller more majestic places. One such place is The Roman Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids' Cathedral Square. Cathedral Square participated last year in ArtPrize but just as an outside venue, but that changed this year. Cathedral Square transformed itself into a land of art by accepting the position of being one of the seven exhibition sight center where people could go resister and vote.
But what makes Cathedral Square the best place to begin is the site being one of a few places that offers free-parking. The square itself is not easy to miss thanks to a 24ft. steel sculpture name “Whirling Dervish.”-Ruth Migdal-Brown is the artist responsible for the 7,000-pund piece and says the bright red giant monument represents movement and dance. Inside there are 24 pieces of art, in the gardens and, the Healer Plaza supplying the venue with a total of 32 pieces. However there are sums of 35 artists, for Cathedral Square features collaborative art as well. The Square is the right amount of distance away from the heart of downtown to have a calming and warming aura that escapes the other venues, but still manages to attract enough people to withhold a reassuring sense of community.
When asked to give a small statement about Cathedral Square Center and ArtPrize, the sites curator Ron Pederson, a professor of art at Aquinas College and also an ArtPrize artist himself said in a previous MLive story “We wanted work that would encourage contemplation, that would allow the viewer to understand something of the artist's spirit and something of the spirit of the community within which she or he is working.”