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How student debtors took a radical idea to the mainstream
Illustrations by Lyndon Hayes
In the summer of 2007, Thomas Gokey had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was thinking about how much his degree had cost him. His diploma was a simple piece of paper, but it came with a price tag of thousands of dollars dollars that were themselves pieces of paper, transmitted to him in the form of student loans, which he now owed to the federal government. While chewing on this thought, he had an idea for a project that would occupy him for much of the next year. He obtained a letter of permission from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to go to a Federal Reserve bank of his choice and pick out some shredded bills from its stores of mutilated currency. One day, he walked over to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, five blocks from the Art Institute, and asked for some money.
ArtPrize is Coming Back in 2021
We’ve don t have a lot of information on this yet, but ArtPrize is making a comeback to West Michigan.
Originally created in 2009, the art competition was a yearly staple in the Grand Rapids area until 2018 when organizers announced it would be switching to a biannual event. Prior to that announcement Art Prize was considered the largest contemporary art exhibit and contest in the United States.
In 2019, they tried a scaled-back version of the event called Project 1, which still had plenty of art associated with the series, and brought people into the Grand Rapids area, but wasn’t near the crowd attractor that ArtPrize had been in the years before.