TIME magazine says ArtPrize is a place to party. Time’s travel section today named ArtPrize on its worldwide list of “Five Festive Events You Won’t Want to Miss in 2013.”

ArtPrize 2013, which returns in September, is listed alongside an event in Indonesia, one in New Zealand and two in Europe.
 

ArtPrize 2013, the radical exhibition and competition created in 2009, ranked No. 4 on the list unveiled today in Time’s Style Section along with such internationally famous events as the Eurovision Song Contest, which ranked No. 2.


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No. 1 Grand Rapids, Michigan

Rankings (of 100 largest metros):
Median Income: 65 Cost of Living Index: 6 Housing Affordability: 7 Commuting: 22 Pct. Owning Homes: 5 (75%) Crime: 27 Education: 35
President Gerald Ford’s hometown is home to several furniture makers. The public school system is supplemented by several charter schools.

                                                         

You may have heard of this whole green building and urban farming they’ve got going on in Detroit these days. But another Michigan city is quietly becoming a nationally recognized leader in the realm of sustainability.

That city is Grand Rapids. Located in the southwest sector of the lower peninsular on the Grand River, it’s a city — like so many in Michigan and throughout the Midwest — with a history in manufacturing. Specifically, furniture manufacturing, a heritage that lives on in the fact that Grand Rapids remains the global headquarters of renowned office-furniture manufacturer Herman Miller.

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ArtPrize 2012’s Top 10 finalists include one work of art in the Grand River and one that soared over it. Richard Morse’s “Stick-to-it-ive-ness,” the first ArtPrize entry in the water since the inaugural ArtPrize in 2009, and “Lights in the Night,” which sent 15,000 Chinese lanterns flying over Grand Rapids on Friday, both are among the Top 10 finalists, announced this afternoon in Rosa Parks Circle. Also among the Top 10 are at least two foreign-born artists, Martijn van Wagtendonk’s “Song of Lift” from The Netherlands and Kumi Yamashita’s “Origami” from Japan. “The Chase,” by Dennis Harris and Artistry of Wildlife, realistically depicts animals with fur and skin. Dan Heffron’s “Life in Wood” uses wood to create seal skin.
 

ArtPrize 2010 first prize winner Chris LaPorte returned to the Top 10 with a large scale-drawing, “City Band,” not far from Adonna Khare’s "Elephants" large-scale drawing, both in the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Frits Hoendervanger’s “Rebirth of Spring” is an oil painting, same as ArtPrize 2009’s “Open Water no. 24” by Ran Ortner. Sandra Bryant’s “Return to Eden” is a glass mosaic, similar materials used in ArtPrize 2011’s “Crucifixion” by Mia Tavonatti.

When British surgeon Dr. Marcus Haw received a phone call from an old friend suggesting he consider working in Grand Rapids, he laughed it off.
 

He had spent 15 years as chief of congenital cardiovascular surgery at the University Hospital of Southampton, building one of the top-ranked programs in the United Kingdom.
 

“I said, ‘No. Where is Grand Rapids? I’m not going to America. I’m very, very happy where I am,’” Haw recalled.
 

Less than a year later, he sat in the cafeteria at Spectrum Health’s Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, talking excitedly about joining Dr. Neal Hillman in leading a major expansion of the pediatric cardiac surgery program.

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GRAND RAPIDS – LaughFest 2012 opened its 10-day festival with 607 people wearing chicken beaks and doing the “Chicken Dance” to set a new world record.

Let the laughs begin.

Gilda’s LaughFest, which opened its first festival last year with a rubber chicken toss, kicked off its second festival of seriously funny stuff on Friday with more than 600 people enduring the cold, wearing yellow beaks, and waggling their wings to start 10 days of stand-up comedy, improv, movies and more.

Some 649 people, shortly after 6 p.m., were corralled in the “chicken coop” on Louis Street near the Grand Rapids Art Museum, along with such characters as Cluck from WFGR-FM (98.7)

GRAND RAPIDS – When ArtPrize first was unveiled in 2009, people asked, “What's ArtPrize”?

Then they asked, “Can you believe ArtPrize?” and “Why didn't we think of ArtPrize first?”

Three years later, people in other cities mostly ask, “How can we have our own ArtPrize?”

The exhibition and competition created by social media entrepreneur Rick DeVos has earned legions of fans and critics, but no one can deny the first three events attracted thousands of participating artists and tens of thousands of viewers.

ArtPrize executive director Catherine Creamer last week spoke to the Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce, chatting up ArtPrize 2011, which attracted work by more than 1,500 artists, drawing 300,000 visitors who helped hotels in Kent County see double-digit growth the past two years in a row.

What if Grand Rapids could attract a company that generated revenues of a billion or more to our city? Think along the lines of megabank PNC or a sizzler of a tech company like Facebook.

Or think about this: by increasing the number of college graduates in Grand Rapids by one percent of our population, what would be generated in additional personal incomes, or revenue? Annually?

"The best way to measure the economic success of a city is per capita income and the simple most direct connection of per capita income is college attainment," says Lee Fisher, president of CEOs for Cities, a civic lab and network of urban leaders across the country.