Lansing Art Gallery sticks to its mission, online and out of doors

Two years ago, skeptics thought it was a gamble to place major works of temporary art in a highly trafficked, graffiti-prone stretch of the Lansing River Trail from downtown to Cedar Street.

In 2020, with art galleries closed down and a cloistered public thirsting for culture, the Lansing Art Gallery’s ArtPath project — about to enter its third year — seems almost prophetic.

A juried exhibit of outdoor sculpture and murals by the area’s top artists, with plenty of room for social distance, is one of several ways the gallery plans to stick to its mission.

“People suspect that maybe we are laying low, but we are not,” Lansing Art Gallery executive director Barb Whitney declared.

Anyone who has followed Whitney’s passionate push to keep art at the heart of the community knows she is not the cloistered type.

“The thought of closing our doors to the community was difficult, emotionally, for me,” she said. “I’m gradually letting that go and I’m helping lead our team toward new ways of engagement.”

Until ArtPath goes up in a few weeks, art lovers can enjoy two vivid online salvos of creative student art at the Lansing Art Gallery’s web site.

Quarantine couldn’t stop the gallery from going ahead with two staples of its yearly calendar and linchpins of its year-round commitment to art education. The winners even got cash prizes this year, thanks to museum donors who appreciate the competition’s stimulating ripple effect on art education in mid-Michigan.

The high school competition, Art Scholarship Alert, is a vivid bouquet of portraiture, abstraction, humor, horror, whimsy and all-around weirdness, a juried exhibition of art by 9th-12th graders from nine central Michigan counties. The exhibit also features the coolest ceramic cake dish you ever saw.

Art Scholarship Alert is impressive enough in conventional 2-D, but the collegiate exhibit adds another dimension - literally. The virtual tour swoops the viewer into a 3-D representation of the gallery, with stops at every work of art. It’s a fun way to revisit the gallery’s familiar walls and nooks and a chance to observe sculptures and other 3-D artworks in ways 2-D images couldn’t capture.

A stunning variety of artistic approaches, subjects, themes and personalities pop off the virtual walls. This year’s exhibit is blessed with more than its fair share of rich and absorbing self-portraits.

“The work we see in the collegiate exhibition is often some of the most poignant and potentially confrontational that we see throughout the year,” Whitney said.

A tour through a shuttered gallery is impressive enough, but for its next trick, the Lansing Art Gallery plans to take its mission outside, as plans move forward for ArtPath.

Anyone who made the pilgrimage to ArtPath in the past two years knows that a display of anodyne outdoor decor is not in the cards. Past shows have included ringing, interactive metal sculptures, fluttering fabric art, an installation of plastic bottles responding to the Flint water crisis, a glowing eyeball on a stalk and a stunning mural by Isaiah Lattimore, still visible near the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge, that combines fine art imagery with graffiti-like flourishes.

When the gallery shut down in March for the pandemic, ArtPath suddenly seemed less like a summer dessert to the gallery season and more like a crucial main course. Whitney said the project is a way for the community to engage in “inspired activity that’s health conscious.”

But an exhibit this substantial, and public, takes time and money to mount, not to mention buy-in and guidance from city officials.

“We weren’t sure, at first, whether we’d have the amount of interest from our community, from our artists,” Whitney said.

She needn’t have worried. Artists have already submitted a pile of proposals. Two big ArtPath sponsors, Rathbun Agency and AutoOwners Insurance, signed on two weeks ago. The city of Lansing is already working on approval of the jury-selected artwork.

In a month or so, three miles of the Lansing River Trail will be dotted with about 20 major art works.

“It is going to happen, and we are thrilled,” Whitney said.

That left Whitney with one more big worry.

Art education has been drastically cut back in schools all over the state, including greater Lansing. One of the Lansing Art Gallery’s core missions, as Whitney sees it, is to help take up the slack. Working with the Lansing School District, the gallery offers hands-on art classes to elementary and middle school students, many of whom would otherwise not get the chance to create art with a professional teacher. Youth camps, adult classes and other services all seemed threatened by this spring’s economic uncertainty.

Whitney wasn’t even sure the gallery could draw up a budget and plan for its educational programming for 2020-21.

Again, major past funders came through and it looks like the gallery will be ready when school re-open.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I was,” Whitney said.

Whitney has high praise for Keith Rouse, the Lansing Art Gallery’s board president, for helping to shepherd the gallery through a strange and difficult process.

Whitney said she and Rouse have had plenty of “cathartic” conversations about navigating the financial aid, grants and other obstacles that erupted from the earth in March.

“Having a leader who’s in regular contact, who is listening and engaging and leading our board of directors in a time of crisis has been invaluable,” she said.

Anyone who cares to support the Lansing Art Gallery’s various projects can designate the gallery as a charity on Amazon Smile, take advantage of the coronavirus relief act’s $300 tax-deductible incentive, or sponsor an ArtPath 2020 sites.

Check out Lansing Art Gallery's virtual tours at lansingartgallery.org/michigan-collegiate-art-exhibition