30,000 pieces of chalk. The downtown city sidewalks are your canvas. Go. Create. Write, draw, color whatever you want, any way you want it. Thousands of people, on a beautiful sunny day in April, journeyed to the center of Grand Rapids to put their mark on the city.
And oh, the marks they made, they were beautiful. Lots of flowers. The Sun. The Earth. Beatles lyrics were big. "Love Wins". Hope. Peace. Slogans that made you laugh, slogans that made you think. Designs around the planted trees in the sidewalks, on the manhole covers, even in the streets themselves in a few places; circles, squares, lines, in all the colors of the rainbow. Sports teams; the Red Wings here and there. Local pro teams. Local high schools. The U of M more than once. Yes, there were many rainbows, hearts, mythical creatures like dragons and unicorns and mermaids, balloons, cartoons, everything from the drawings of children holding these big pieces chalk in their tiny hands that would be like a small tree trunk to an adult, to the college artists who brought their own rainbow in slim, sharpened sticks, the tools of their classes. Some worked with stencils, others brought a picture from a book to recreate, but most just used their imagination.
Young, old, black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, and some of downtown's homeless, too - all had that determined look that comes with artistic creation as they drew, lost in what I call "The Zone", bent over their work in the warm sun, and all ended with a smile when their art was complete, showing their friends, taking a picture, and then moving on to the next blank cement canvas down the block. Music emanated from the speakers placed at Rosa Parks Circle, vendors sold food and drinks both outside and in. Crowded, but still comfortable, as everyone just enjoyed the day.
Now, if you live in the media/internet world like I do, you would think that current events would be on people's minds. The economy, for the most part, right? Unemployment, foreclosures, taxes, "socialism", on and on and on and on... what would these people create, left to their own devices, with all this free chalk? I wondered. The organizer of the event, Rob Bliss, had asked that politics and religion and "offensive" things be left out of this, but it's not like anyone was going to stop you from drawing those things if you wanted. And to be sure, a few items did slip in here and there. Jesus made it onto the pavement in a few places, Obama put in an appearance, a "Fox News" logo in a red circle with a slash, but interestingly enough, nothing about taxes or ACORN, that I saw anyway. Out of the thousands of pieces of artwork and graffiti that covered the sidewalks for blocks - positive, healthy, happy, loving, and downright pretty won the day.
And after some of the things I read and saw earlier in the week, this almost brought me to tears a couple times, when I stopped, really stopped to think, about the difference in feeling, in sentiment, in the whole vibration of the event. Something like this can really restore your soul.
Simply beautiful. Thank you, Grand Rapids.
GRAND RAPIDS -- Downtown flooded Saturday without a drop of rain or a dam bursting. Instead, sidewalks were awash with color as thousands of children, college students, adults and senior citizens descended on a sunny, warm central city for the first-ever Grand Rapids Chalk Flood, a free event organized by 20-year-old Rob Bliss.
"I'm really happy. It's such a beautiful day, easily the best day in all of April," said Bliss, as artists of all shapes, sizes, ages and colors were spilling over from Rosa Parks Circle on to sidewalks throughout downtown.
Dozens of boxes of thick, pastel sidewalk chalk sticks were being cracked open, the contents, purchased with private donor funds, distributed free to all who came. By day's end much of the stock of 30,000 sticks had been worn down to tiny chips and nubs.
The result was several downtown blocks decorated with what may be the largest single-medium instant art display this city has ever seen -- at times beautiful, sometimes hilarious, always colorful.
The Press story has a few YouTube videos, and if you want to see all 71 pictures at once, click here. Rob Bliss plans to hold more "urban experiments" in the future, can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
