Celebrating the Arts
After 25 years as the Fall Arts Celebration organized through the President’s office, the premier celebration of the arts at Grand Valley is now a year long GVSU Arts Celebration with CLAS at the reins. Despite the challenges inherent in the pandemic for connecting audiences with the arts, the newly formed steering committee presented five exciting events which spanned the academic year under the new name GVSU Arts Celebration.
Dean Drake approaches the podium at the Arts Celebration opening reception
The gallery opening featured the artists discussing their work for a delighted audience
Honest and Unrefined: Art Outside the Academy
"Honest and Unrefined: Art Outside the Academy" started its run in the GVSU Art Gallery, Haas Center for the Performing Arts, in August 2021. It highlighted artists that live on the margins of and reject the constraints of the art world. Difficult to categorize, their appeal resides in how they ignore convention and experiment with materials to produce authentic, challenging, and inspiring works of art.
In 2005, the GVSU Art Gallery hosted Raw Art: Division Avenue Artists, which took a candid look at a local group of mostly self-taught artists who lived and worked in the Heartside neighborhood of downtown Grand Rapids. Since then, Grand Valley has committed to acquire art from outside the mainstream and incorporate it into its collection.
Sixteen years later, Honest and Unrefined: Art Outside the Academy drew from GVSU’s collection, as well as artists and collectors from around West Michigan, bringing together more than 50 compelling works of art. These pieces often include bright colors, repetitive patterns, and found materials, and are driven by each artist’s desire to create or communicate a deeply personal and sometimes provocative message.
Belated Birthday Party: Tesla String Quartet Performs Music by Beethoven
In October, “Belated Birthday Party: Tesla String Quartet Performs Music by Beethoven” came to Cook-DeWitt Center. While much was lost during the pandemic, including a scheduled 2020 Fall Arts performance by the award-winning Tesla Quartet, Beethoven’s string quartets remain as popular, exciting, and brilliant as ever in this 251st year after his birth. In 2021, to a maximum capacity crowd, the Tesla Quartet performed one of the well-known quartets from his Opus 18 set and additional quartet masterworks.
Tesla Quartet in performance with music faculty members
Students awaiting the performance
Holiday Concert
The traditional December concert, “Coming Together to Celebrate the Holidays,” saw GVSU retirees, faculty, staff, students, and the West Michigan community gather under the Romanesque arches of Fountain Street Church. The music selected recognized many of the countries severely affected by the pandemic by choosing a holiday selection that is symbolic of each individual nation’s Christmas celebrations. Represented areas include Mexico, Spain, Russia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and there were best-loved selections from Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” Handel’s “Messiah,” and the exciting Willcocks settings of English carols in a sing-along version.
Winter 2022 Events Adapted to Circumstances
Due to a heightened alert level during the Omicron surge, Winter 2022 events of the GVSU Arts Celebration were presented in a webinar format. While live presentations of our exciting guests were hoped for, alumni and community members from coast to coast were able to hear our guests in this alternative format.
Poetry Night
Danez Smith, Ericka “Kyd Kane” Thompson, and Marcel “Fable the Poet” Price were the latest headliners in Grand Valley State University’s Poetry Night, a two-decades-long tradition of bringing acclaimed poets to share their work with the GVSU community. Smith is a nationally celebrated and award-winning poet whose work inspires our current and previous Grand Rapids Poet Laureates.
An Evening with Hanif Abdurraqib
“An Evening with Hanif Abdurraqib” provided a fitting finale to the 2021-2022 GVSU Arts Celebration.
Hanif Abdurraqib, poet, essayist, and cultural critic, shared ideas from his upcoming book, followed by a conversation between Abdurraqib and Dr. Louis Moore, GVSU professor of history. Together the conversation wove together lyrical analyses of music, sports, collectibles, writing process, and the influence of childhood experiences and place in identity.
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