Think you’ve seen all the best of ArtPrize? If your strategy is to park once, hit the downtown core and walk in circles until your feet hurt, chances are you haven’t.
About a mile north of the downtown ArtPrize bustle, in the newly renamed River North Business District, sits one of the festival’s more curious creations: Cūra Gallery.
The space is a purpose-built, ArtPrize-curated exhibition hub next to Silva, Mark Secchia’s sprawling circus-themed restaurant and entertainment complex. Unlike many ArtPrize venues, Cūra exists for essentially one reason: to show ArtPrize art.
And this year, there is a lot of it.
Cūra contains 52 pieces, making it the second-largest ArtPrize-curated venue by number of entries, behind DeVos Place’s 53.
For comparison:
- DeVos Place: 53 pieces
- Cura Gallery: 52
- Kendall College of Art and Design: 34
- The B.O.B.: 41
- Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum: 31
- ArtPrize Clubhouse: 15
That puts this pop-up gallery in the same league as the festival’s heavy hitters downtown.
“The space has something for everyone: beautiful portraits, mixed media, interactive installations, landscapes, sculpture and some of the best work I’ve seen,” said artist Sadie Rose, whose 3D piece, Feast, occupies a pedestal visible from the entrance. “One of the best curated, anyway. It feels like you’re in a professional gallery space.”
And that’s not a coincidence.
The root of the word “curate” is the Latin word cura, meaning to care, explained ArtPrize Director of Exhibitions JoLee Kirkikis Casares, who has held the job for 10 years.
According to the ArtPrize website, Cūra is “an ode to both the caregiver and care receiver,” with this year’s exhibition exploring health and wellness, caregiving and care receiving, and the cycles of birth, life and death.
That’s where Rose’s Feast comes in.
According to the Artist’s statement, the 39″ × 19″ × 12″ felt sculpture was inspired by Rembrandt’s still life painting Slaughtered Ox. The 3D sculpture “questions traditional ideas surrounding decay, approaching rot as a site of rebirth and as a necessary process for the continuation of life.”
Last year’s ArtPrize winner, Mark Lewanski, has a new woven glass piece on display at Cūra Gallery this year, alongside 51 others, many of whom traveled from afar to participate. In short, some of the work inside Cūra is exactly the sort of thing ArtPrize visitors come to Grand Rapids hoping to find.
So…Where is Cūra Gallery?
The confusion is apparent online.
On Reddit, there was an entire discussion dedicated to the subject.
“We wanted to go there yesterday because they are supposed to have last year’s winner on display,” said one Reddit user, explaining that a Google search produced results for a gallery in California. (Curiously, when I typed “Cura” into Google, this Reddit discussion was at the top of the search.)
Another Reddit user incorrectly answered that Cūra was situated inside the restaurant Silva.
But that wasn’t the correct answer, either. Cūra is an actual gallery, albeit temporary, next door.
That distinction mattered greatly to another Reddit poster who had expressed apprehension over entering businesses simply to look at art — “walking uncomfortably past staff” at places they didn’t intend to patronize.
Cūra eliminates that awkwardness entirely.
You don’t have to enter a restaurant. You don’t have to pretend you’re considering dinner. You don’t have to squeeze past workers or people trying to enjoy a meal while looking for a painting.
You just walk into the big parking garage door, and suddenly you’re in a gallery.
A gallery built to be demolished
Two days before the start of the competition, during preview week, Cūra didn’t exactly look like an art destination.
Workers were still pounding away, building wooden frames, installing drywall and hanging gallery-grade lighting.
It was a remarkable amount of effort for a space that would exist for less than a month.
For now, though, it is a surprisingly serious exhibition space.
On a cold, wet Friday, the artists inside Cūra mostly sat and waited for ArtPrize attendees to realize that the festival doesn’t end where the downtown crowds thin out.
Wendy Anderson Halperin was among them.
Her installation, “The Appreciation Project,” features a collection of what she calls “Subway People” — three-dimensional figures that began as drawings made on the New York City subway.
“Ever since going to art school in Brooklyn I have loved drawing people on the subway,” Halperin writes in her artist statement. “Figure drawing became a passion.”
Back in Michigan, those drawings became clay figures. She fires them, paints them and turns the fleeting people she encountered underground into permanent objects.
It’s the sort of work that rewards actually walking into the room. (And these photos don’t do any of the artwork justice.)
As I was looking around the gallery, I overheard a man tell her that he had already visited all of the other ArtPrize venues and thought Cūra contained the best overall collection of art he had seen.
His concern was whether everyone else would make the trip.
Probably not, he suggested.
And that’s the peculiar predicament Cūra finds itself in.
It may be one of ArtPrize’s more worthwhile stops while also being one of the easiest to miss.
It isn’t an easy trek for most to make on foot, especially after wandering around in circles downtown.
Instead, look for driving directions HERE to launch routing directly inside your smartphone’s navigation app.
And though you won’t be able to pull in, at least you’ll know exactly where you’re headed after you find nearby parking on the street.
Cura Gallery
975 Ottawa Ave NW Grand Rapids
Hours:
Monday–Saturday, Noon–8 p.m.
Sunday, Noon– 6 p.m.
