The holidays officially kick off not with Black Friday, or even with Thanksgiving eve, but when Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park unveils its annual Christmas and Holiday Traditions Around the World exhibition Tuesday, Nov. 22.
A model of the Chomeiji Temple in Omihachiman Shiga Prefecture of Japan.
The display, open through Jan. 8, presents more than 40 international trees and displays, as well as the railway garden and several special events and activities.
“This year we’re celebrating not only the various holiday traditions observed around the world, but also the folklore that makes these celebrations so unique,” Steve LaWarre, Meijer Gardens director of horticulture, said in supplied material. “Many of these traditions are rooted in horticulture and natural elements. … (including how) legendary folklore such as mistletoe, spider webs, olive trees and rosemary are important parts of holiday customs around the world.”
The exhibition will include narratives and special displays from Iceland, Ghana, Germany and other counties and cultures. The railway garden meanders through four indoor garden spaces, including the newly renovated Grace Jarecki Seasonal Display Greenhouse.
Another highlight will the return of the beautiful Eid ul-Fitr display, which celebrates the end of the Muslim holy period of Ramadan.
Meijer Gardens is open daily but is closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. There will be extended holiday hours not just on Tuesdays as usual but also Dec. 19-23 and 26-30. There will also be special events such as The Original Dickens Carolers, Santa visits, Rooftop Reindeer, the Christmas Cabaret Gala, and winter-time walks and classes on select days and times.
“Ditch Lily Drawing,” by Nathan Lareau, is in the ArtPrize 8 Top 20. It is under the installation category. (Supplied photo.)
ArtPrize can often seem overwhelming, with 170 venues and almost 1,500 entries, sometimes it seems as though viewers can only run a quick hand over individual works as so many more beckon during the three-week run.
But the Frederik Meijer Garden & Sculpture Park’s always unique, often astounding, contribution to Grand Rapids’ annual explosion of art is not only a “must see” venue of the event, but it also has a longevity not offered by many of the venues – the show will continue through the end of the year, making it a “must see again, at leisure” opportunity.
Meijer Gardens’ exhibition, “Almost Home: Grand Rapids in Focus,” continues free to the public through the run of ArtPrize 8, Sunday, Oct. 9. It will then continue on display through Dec. 31, available with admission.
In recent years, the Gardens have offered an international snapshot of the modern art world brought home to Grand Rapids. This year’s exhibit still offers a closely curated spectrum – 13 artists and artistic visions – but there is a consistent theme of homemade, homegrown familiarity in the milieu.
“Each artist has a special connection to the city and has offered an original reflection on it,” Joseph Becherer, chief curator and vice president of exhibitions and collections, said in supplied material. “All sculptures and installations were created specifically for this exhibition, reflecting the social and historical, industries and enterprises, the natural and the creative forces that helped shape Grand Rapids.”
The artists in the exhibit include married couples, fathers and sons, longtime local artistic forces and relatively newcomers to Grand Rapids’ artistic home front.
Two that attracted my attention in my first – all too rushed – sweep through the gallery were Nathan Lareau’s simple yet exquisitely complex “Ditch Lily Drawing” and Anna Campbell’s complex yet exquisitely simple “Chosen Family, Chosen Name, Separatist, Safe Space, Ex-Pat, Invert, Homophile, Homestead”.
For “Ditch Lily Drawing,” Lareau uses the clean, simple lines of dried daylily stalks in all-white mosaic that, when carefully illuminated by shadow-inducing spotlights, ceases to be individual objects from nature and becomes a single, textured objets d’art which somehow reminds one of both Michigan’s cornfields in winter and some distant, cold, almost barren, otherworld.
Lareau, born and raised in rural Michigan where the lifecycle of daylilies are familiar, studied and now teaches at Aquinas College. In his artist’s statement he says: “My background in percussion has cultivated a fascination for rhythm and pattern and leads me to seek out examples of such in the physical world. The daylily possesses these elements not only through its time-measuring name, but also the visual rhythm of its growth.”
Campbell’s mixed media installation “Chosen Family, Chosen Name, Separatist, Safe Space, Ex-Pat, Invert, Homophile, Homestead,” in contrast, uses a variety of seemingly incongruent if not conflicting objects – a polished tabletop with a seemingly random spread of small glasses, a piece of children’s clothing hanging lifeless, roped gateways usually associated with entry or rejection at a nightclub.
Campbell, who is new to Grand Rapids and teaches art and design at Grand Valley State University, says in her artist’s statement that “this work is an assemblage of diverse strategies and terms that LGBT and other marginalized people have used over generations to mark the labor of making and naming home.”
My first impression, at first glance, sees the focal point as the glasses: most are grouped together or at least in some pattern (a family, or group, at home?), while several are separate, either seeking entry to the whole or willingly accepting a different path.
I look forward to spending more time with the work, at leisure, after ArtPrize’s run and finding other nuances.
— K.D. Norris
What’s Next:
Artist in Conversation talks on Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 6 p.m. with Ron Pederson and Campbell; Sunday, Oct. 23, at 2 p.m. with Darlene Kaczmarczyk and Lareau; and Sunday, Oct. 30 at p.m. with Norwood Viviano and Joyce Recker. There will be a gallery walk and talk Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. with Becherer.
Dreaming of a green paradise where you can shed your coat, toss off your hat and feast your eyes on exotic wildlife? Now add hundreds of colorful butterflies flitting so close some even land on your hand, your hair, your kids!
From March 1 through April 30 the dream comes true at Meijer Gardens Butterfly Exhibit.
For the past 20 years, Meijer Gardens has brought more than 7,000 tropical butterflies to West Michigan from Africa, Asia, South and Central America. It’s the largest temporary tropical butterfly exhibition in the nation.
Approximately 50 colorful species will fly freely in the five-story Lena Meijer Tropical Conservatory. At 85 degrees and 70 percent humidity, this balmy environment mimics tropical regions where the butterflies thrive.
Visitors can learn about the life cycle of the butterflies in the Butterfly Bungalow, where adult butterflies emerge from cocoons and spread their wings for the first time.
Included in the species arriving from this area are the Columbian and Common Morpho, two visitor favorites whose blue iridescent color seems to change in flight, in addition to many others.
The butterfly exhibit attracts more than 170,000 visitors from all over the nation each year. For more information contact awolschleger@meijergardens.org or call 616-975-3155.
