Thank you to the thousands of ArtPrize visitors for helping us to successfully complete our eight years of ArtPrize. It has been an amazing journey. I would like to acknowledge and thank over fifty volunteers—plus the Girl Scouts of Michigan Shore to Shore. You did a fabulous job serving the ArtPrize guests and showing compassion.…
Because of Tracy’s physical defect, the other middle school students would taunt: “Don’t go near her. She’s got some sort of disease. Stay away or you’ll get it too.” The shunning pained her. A couple of years later during high school, Tracy noticed Rick, another student sitting on the bus by himself. So Tracy asked…
Sarah’s Story The scars bullying leaves may never be seen by the naked eye. The following three vignettes tell the stories of three generations of women who were bullied in their childhood and how that changed not only how they saw others, but also how they saw and felt about themselves. Sarah shares her family…
By guest writer Brittany Costantini My story does not begin with being shoved into a locker or being physically harmed in any way. I was never bullied to the point of not wanting to go to school because I was scared of what would happen. However, I was bullied in a way that has affected…
Courage Ablaze tells the story of the innocent women and children caught in the crossfire of annihilation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Though the fires of adversity scorched their families, these fierce women are salvaging what’s left and starting over. Since first debuting at ArtPrize 2012, I completed twenty-five additional portraits and recorded…
That night I couldn’t sleep. Images of humans displayed like animals in a pet store window haunted me. When I was nineteen, while traveling through Europe, our tour bus stopped at the Red Light Windows of Amsterdam. As I stood in the middle of the district, window after window displayed women perched on chairs—selling their…
The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man. J. Sterling Morton My dad loved to plant trees. His love for trees inspired my husband and me to plant a tree everywhere we lived from California to Philadelphia to Denver to Germany to Grand Rapids. One of…