Installing Art Prize!

a beautiful day for a road trip!

Kimberly Kelly Santini (friend and fellow artist extraordinaire) and I hit the road (only pit stopping for coffee) yesterday morning for MVP Metro Club with a van full of panels, artwork, and power tools! Grand Rapids proved to be a very nice city offering wonderful old architecture and clean sidewalks!

the exterior of our ArtPrize venue, MVP Metro Club on Fountain St.

one of the many main buildings in town dedicated to the event

ArtPrize is a HUGE event, it has pretty much taken over the city, with 163 venues displaying the work of over 1700 artists! Every where we turned there were banners and graphics with the logo and that wonderful vibrating line pattern, the city is buzzing with anticipation of the opening on the 19th. 

the lobby of MVP Metro Club, unpacking and hanging

Unpacking and setting up art on the panels that Kim and her husband made to hang collages in front of the glass block wall that MVP Metro Club has in their main lobby. They came up with a pretty amazing solution which ultimately looked really good! We spent the day going up and down the ladder with power tools and wire cutters. 

hanging with art cards

I used my mad graphic design skills to make us individual artwork tags and bios to hang on the wall with the work. Thanks to Katie, my monitor from the Traverse City workshop, we had them professionally printed and mounted to foam core. We are BIG TIME now!

how professional do we look?

We spent a long time installing the artwork, getting our pieces to flow and look exactly as we wanted them to. Our wall of combined work offers a bunny and some koi fish that we each did our own take on, style and media. 

our wall of collaboration

Check out the ArtPrize website to learn more about voting, and the event itself. If you are anywhere near Grand Rapids, MI you might just want to make the trip.

Check out the Paper Paintings Facebook page for an album of more images from the day!