ArtPrize 2025’s biggest venue is coming to SoDIV

The Art of Life NOW! will host five dozen entrants to the big art show, along with myriad vendors and events.

Move over, Amway Grand. Step aside, Gerald R. Ford Museum. Make room, DeVos Center. The center of ArtPrize 2025 activity will be in Heartside — anchored by The Art of Life NOW!, a huge pop-up venue at the corner of Cherry Street and South Division Avenue. 

Vacant for years since its stint as space for Goodwill Industries, 200 Division Ave. S serves as a palette for the shared vision  of Charles and Chelsea Holley, owners of The Art of Life Gallery and Studio on Leonard Street. 

Their goal: To turn the maze-like commercial space (a car dealership  in the 1920s) into an ArtPrize venue the likes of which Grand Rapids has never seen, both in scale and style. With close to 60 ArtPrize entries, The Art of Life NOW! dwarfs other venues. 

“No one’s ever done this before — to have an ArtPrize venue and an art venue and a vendor marketplace and a performance space all under one roof during Art Prize,” Charles said.

 The venue choice was intentionally unique as well. “There are not enough abandoned warehouse art gallery spaces in Grand Rapids,” Charles said. “We’re leaning into that kind of gritty DC, New York style.”

“It’s not manicured, it’s not a finely curated and beautiful air-conditioned space,” Charles told GO HEARTSIDE, and that’s the point. 

“The setting might make you a little uncomfortable being there. … The presentation of the art, it’s often going to be different, a little more jarring and sometimes disturbing,” he said. 

The Holleys plan a variety of curated areas throughout the venue: traditional gallery hanging space, a low-light gallery, large areas for vendors, and hidden corners to explore. One rundown room with big garage doors will be a cityscape mural. The next room — small and square — will be a clean, white, well-lit gallery area.

“It’s going to be a very shocking transition from the cityscape into this curated, manicured, pretty little box. And a lot of art that’s in here deals with identity issues, gender roles, emotional well-being, abuse,” Charles said. “It’s the pain of conformity, of trying to fit within these walls.”

A drive for diversity

As they curate this large venue, the Holleys are centering diversity and inclusivity. “It’s not paint prize, right? It’s ArtPrize,” Charles said. Throughout the three-week event, the couple hopes to host artist round tables, movie showings, a fashion showcase, and other kinds of larger-scale performance art, in addition to the stationary exhibits. 

Even the stationary art exhibits may change, though. “It’s going to be a very dynamic space,” Charles said. The NOW! Gallery may add local artists throughout the show, and they hope to provide a temporary wall for tag artists to showcase and continuously modify their art. 

In doing so, the Holleys are prioritizing the inclusion of local artists who may not have had the same opportunities, conventional kinds of success, or even the desire to see their name make it big.

“Especially with a lot of the tag art, street art guys, they don’t want their names associated with their art because they’re often doing it in illegal places. But we’re inviting them in so their art can be seen in a gallery setting,” Charles said. “People get to see and appreciate the work because it’s really some of the most amazing art I’ve ever seen.”

Ultimately, the Holleys’ primary goals are to: respect artists, capitalize on the buildings’ capacity for storytelling, and engage people with art in a way they haven’t engaged before. 

“People are going to be very open during ArtPrize,” he said. “What we’re trying to do with some of the performance — and our art too — is show people things in a safe environment that they might not have seen before or been exposed to before or have had a context to understand.”

The gallery will only be open temporarily, for the three-week duration of ArtPrize. But in that time, Charles hopes visitors will get as much as they can out of the space.  

“I don’t want it to be a walkthrough once and never come back,” Charles said. “It’s something people are going to come back to because it’s an experience. Just being here will be an experience.”