Grand Rapids
— — a foundry town that learned to paint.
Not only on a wall.
“A city that made its name on furniture and kept its hands on the work. The Grand River runs straight through the middle of it, and every September the bridges and warehouses fill up with art for ArtPrize. Walk a few blocks east and the Frederik Meijer sculpture park keeps the same conversation going year-round. It is a working town that grew an eye. — from the studio
Grand Rapids, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Grand Rapids sits on the Grand River in western Michigan, about thirty miles east of Lake Michigan and the dunes at Holland. It is the second-largest city in the state after Detroit, with a metropolitan population near 1.1 million. The river drops over a set of low rapids in the downtown core — the feature the city is named for — and a long-running restoration project is rebuilding them as a paddleable run. Kent County surrounds it; the wider region of West Michigan reaches north to Muskegon and south toward Kalamazoo.
The city's calendar pivots on ArtPrize, an open public art competition first held in 2009 that turns roughly 150 downtown venues into galleries for about nineteen days each autumn. Hundreds of artists install work along the river corridor; the public votes alongside a juried prize. The festival reshaped the way visitors arrive in Grand Rapids and gave a furniture town a second identity as an art town. Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, on the east side, holds the year's other anchor with rotating outdoor work across 158 acres.
The Grand is Michigan's longest river at 252 miles, draining most of the lower peninsula's west side before reaching Lake Michigan at Grand Haven. The rapids that once powered the city's sawmills and furniture factories were buried under low-head dams in the nineteenth century; the Grand Rapids Whitewater project has been working since 2009 to remove four of them and restore a runnable stretch of class II water through downtown. When it is finished the river will again do in public what the city was named for.