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10/4/21 - ArtPrize 2021 Winners

Monday, October 4, 2021 at 8:19 AM

photo: Cory Morse - MLive

Prizes were handed out for the winners of the 2021 ArtPrize event. The entries around downtown Grand Rapids were on display through Sunday, Oct. 3.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — (Mlive) - “Before You Go,” a repurposed phone booth where users can hear advice and words of wisdom recorded by residents from Grand Rapids and beyond, has won the 2021 ArtPrize grand prize.

The entry was created by mother and son team Christian Reichle and Monica Pritchard, both of whom live in Grand Rapids, and is located on the Blue Bridge in downtown Grand Rapids.

They take home a $50,000 prize.

“I think people are thirsty for community and need people and have to have conversations with people before its too late,” Pritchard says in a recording, describing her exhibit, that can be played inside her ArtPrize entry. “I think maybe having listened to a few of these stories that we have collected will prompt them to go and start having conversations that they may have been reluctant to have had.”

The winners of ArtPrize 2021 were announced Friday, Oct. 1 in a broadcast by WOOD-TV.

ArtPrize attendees who step inside “Before You Go” can pick up a telephone and choose, by pressing a button on the phone, to listen to recordings of people offering advice, and discussing legacy, helping others, wishes and regrets, family, travel, beliefs, our relationship with death and more.

Those conversations, according to the project’s webpage, aim “to expose the similarities amongst us and encourage conversation between generations that may otherwise be missed before it is too late.”

“The questions that we ask in this project are fairly basic,” said Reichle, who lives in Ohio but returned to Grand Rapids to work on the exhibit with his mom. “They’re not specific, they’re not earth shattering … but we spent a lot of time considering what the questions were and how they could start to stir up more of those conversations.”

Here’s the other winners announced Friday, with links to their ArtPrize artist page:

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