ARTPRIZE

SEPTEMBER 15th – OCTOBER 2nd, 2022

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum
303 Pearl St NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49504

About my work:
The entirety of my series, Portraits of Home, is on display at the Gerald R. Ford Museum as part of ArtPrize 2022. Attendees of ArtPrize can vote for my work by creating an account and adding my entry to their “favorites” on the ArtPrize visitor hub located at: https://artprize.org/visitorlanding/. 

I will be in Grand Rapids participating in the festivities, greeting visitors and handing out postcards at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum during the weekends of September 16th-18th and September 23rd-25th.

Portraits of Home is 40 piece ongoing series of ink on panel drawings modeled after tintype photography that frame individual façades of endangered homes and vacant lots within the cities of Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan as a form of historical marker or memorial for the people and families that once occupied them. Between outmigration, plummeting home values, and the foreclosure crisis, both cities have significant vacancy rates, 28% and 38.5% respectively, not including homes already lost to demolition. The physical removal of homes throughout the region’s neighborhoods and the harsh erasure of the home within my work represents the very real endangerment of accessible landmarks of communal memory and history and, in this way, Portraits of Home aims to document what still exists, what’s disappearing and what’s already unknown.

About the exhibition:
ArtPrize® is an open, independently organized international art competition which takes place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It celebrates artists working in all mediums from anywhere in the world, and is open to any creative with an artwork to enter and a venue willing to host it.  For 18 days, art is exhibited throughout the city in public parks and museums, in galleries and vacant storefronts, in bars and on bridges. ArtPrize awards $450,000 directly to artists, through grants to support their ambitious work and through prizes which the public decides through the ArtPrize website. Since its inception in 2009, millions have participated in ArtPrize, displaying their work, opening their spaces to artists and visitors from around the world, and sparking countless conversations about what art is and why it matters.