St. Cecelia Music Center and Mackinaw Harvest Music Group want to release art into the atmosphere by sponsoring ArtPrize's first day-long music festival on Sept. 24. For the past two years, ArtPrize has primarily focused on visual arts. This year, however, ArtPrize coordinators have listed St. Cecelia as its official Exhibition Center for musical and performance art and are promoting it as the central venue for the event.
St. Cecelia will feature mostly local musicians performing original pieces written within the past three years, but non-musical artists are also eligible to submit pieces for performance and prize consideration. The artists will perform Friday, Sept. 22 from 12-9 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 23 from 12-7 p.m. in the parking lot of St. Cecelia Music Center, which is located on the corner of Ransom and Fulton in downtown Grand Rapids.
"We estimate that there will be about 25 bands," says Mike Crittenden of Mackinaw Harvest.
Bands that have already signed up include Domestic Problems, Troll for Trout and Verona.
Along with the showcase, St. Cecelia will host a number of listening stations that will feature pieces from the musical performers throughout the entirety of the three-week event, which runs from Sept. 21-Oct. 9, so that ArtPrize attendees who may have missed the live performances can still listen and vote. Crittenden describes the stations as metal displays that will include an iPod Nano, headphones and the track that each performer is submitting for election.
St. Cecelia will give artists the chance to promote and sell CDs during the event at its ArtPrize Marketplace and will also exhibit a number of musically-themed visual art pieces in its Terryberry Gallery.
ArtPrize creator Rick DeVos, son of Grand Rapids mogul Dick DeVos, first announced the event, calling it a "social experiment," in April 2009. The event, which brings the work of local and international artists to the streets of Grand Rapids and relies on public voting to determine the winner, became instantly popular. Last year's ArtPrize featured 1,713 artists from 44 of the United States and 21 countries, and the 250,000-plus event attendees cast a total 465,538 votes.
This will be the final year that top-10 artists from the previous year will be allowed to participate in ArtPrize. Beginning in 2012, prior-year winners will have to take a year off from the event due to the decidedly-unfair advantage artists acquire with the prize money and name recognition that result from being a top-10er.
First prize for this year's event, per usual, is $250,000. The top ten entries will each receive a cash prize, which will bring the total prize amount awarded to $449,000-the world's largest prize amount for an art competition. The deadline to register to be an artist, performance or otherwise, is June 16.
