Wealthy End to End
2008"Wealthy End to End" is a temporary Civic Studio project that explores an important corridor in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Wealthy begins and ends at two large and complex geographic spaces: The old Butterworth Landfill to the West and Reeds Lake to the East. This specific geographical feature emerged in our work that came to structure and frame our inquiry. These spaces are at once visual and material forms that serve public use and imagination in functional, cultural, and recreational ways.
In the end our finished projects cohere to a broad process:
1. Spend focused time in the city around Wealthy.
2. Collect material, visual, and experiential samples.
3. Bring samples into studio consideration, examine, reform, remake, recontextualize.
4. Structure the material with the intent of mediating the experience and imagination of Wealthy.
5. Present the results in a social context to facilitate and maximize the social encounter and dialogue with the studio's work.
By working in samples and projects that are physical structures, we can formally render spatial and social relationships, or differences, we experience when studying the street.
Visual art in a public context has a special feature of being both individual and social experience at the same time. Our work on Wealthy is also shaped by an ongoing discussion of the role of public art in Civic life.
