Art Prize is doing big things for its little hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. By its own accounting (and as previously discussed here), the three-week contest attracted 200,000 visitors to its inaugural edition last summer by inviting them to decide which of 1,262 entries displayed in 159 downtown venues would win the world’s biggest cash prizes for visual art. It also stirred up enough publicity to put Grand Rapids—best known till now as a furniture-manufacturing center—on the art-world map.
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Art Loop Open is the brainchild of Chicago Artists’ Coalition executive director Carolina Jayaram. When the Grand Rapids Art Prize team came to Chicago last spring to recruit contestants for 2010, Jayaram met with them, decided something similar could work here, and proposed the idea to Ty Tabing, executive director of the Chicago Loop Alliance, a downtown booster group. CAC and the CLA were already partnering on the pop-up galleries that are putting local art into empty Loop storefronts, and Jayaram says Tabing and his staff were immediately enthusiastic, as were city officials, including Mayor Daley and cultural affairs commissioner Lois Weisberg.
With only a few months of lead time and no deep-pocketed backer like Art Prize founder Rick DeVos, the Chicago event is starting relatively small. Besides the $25,000 first prize, ALO will hand out second and third prizes of $15,000 and $10,000 (Art Prize: $100,000 and $50,000), plus a roster of specialty awards that’s still being put together. So far it includes $5,000 for the wittiest piece (funded by the Wit Hotel) and $5,000 (from the Driehaus Foundation) for the best representational work.
Jayaram says the venues were chosen with an eye to consistency, but location will be key. Art shown at heavily trafficked event hubs in Grand Rapids (like the former art museum, which logged 80,000 visitors during last year’s Art Prize) was more likely to be seen and therefore more likely to attract votes. ALO has a cluster of venues on or near State Street—including Block 37, which will display about half of the entries and house the ALO Cafe, where visitors can register and cast their ballots. Time will tell, but Block 37 may turn out to be a more advantageous perch than others out at the fringes of the Loop.
