“We had to destroy the art community in Grand Rapids, now we want to control it”, is what I take from the DeVos Institute’s strategy

On May 11th, MLive posted an article entitled, DeVos Institute program helps 14 Grand Rapids nonprofits build capacity.

The MLive article uncritically centers the work of the DeVos Institute of Arts and Non-Profit Management. The article goes on to say: 

Fourteen Grand Rapids area nonprofits are participating in the DeVos institute’s two-year program, Capacity Building: Grand Rapids. It provides participants with personalized consultations, group training sessions, and help with strategic planning and building effective boards, according to a release.

The DeVos Institute website provides us with a framework for what they will be doing with the fourteen Grand Rapids nonprofits that they will be working with:

Our approach is grounded in The Cycle, a practical management framework designed to optimize organizational performance in five essential areas: market position, programming, marketing, governance, and revenue development.

I don’t know about you, but based on what the DeVos Institute says it does, it seems to me that they focus on money, maximizing wealth and expanding wealth. The fourteen groups in Grand Rapids that will be working with the DeVos Institute are non-profit groups and arts-centered organizations. The MLive article lists the following groups:

• Artists Creating Together
• ArtPrize
• Broadway Grand Rapids
• Children’s Healing Center
• Festival of the Arts
• Girls Choral Academy Grand Rapids Art Museum
• Grand Rapids Ballet
• Grand Rapids Children’s Museum
• Grand Rapids Civic Theatre
• Grand Rapids Symphony
• Lowell Arts
• Opera Grand Rapids
• West Michigan Trails
• West Michigan Youth Ballet

Ways in which the DeVos family has undermined local art in Grand Rapids

Being an artist in a Capitalist world is difficult and deeply problematic. When art is seen as a commodity, it loses meaning and it takes from us our ability to see beauty, to imagine, and it diminishes our ability for critical reflection.

When ArtPrize was created by the DeVos family, their goal was never about elevating art, it was about selling the City of Grand Rapids and expanding their wealth. This view of ArtPrize was affirmed by Sam Cummings, CEO of CWD Real Estate Investment, when he said, “Our long-term goal is really to import capital – intellectual capital, and ultimately real capital. And this (ArtPrize) is certainly an extraordinary tool.”

A major outcome of ArtPrize is that it undermined local art and local artists. ArtPrize didn’t pay artists to submit their work for the 2-week spectacle, in fact, they made them pay to submit their work. Many local artists and art venues were negatively impacted, not just during ArtPrize, but for weeks and months leading up to it, since so much capital and so much PR was centered on the spectacle of ArtPrize that artists had to adjust to that world. In addition, local arts councils disbanded and funding sources for art dried up. Hell, even Festival of the Arts was thrown on the scrap heap of the art as a commodity, since it no longer fit the tourist-driven destination that the Grand Rapids Power Structure wants to see.

A second major way that the DeVos family has undermined local art is through their involvement in shaping public policy to promote business interests over the public good. What we have been seeing in Grand Rapids and the US as a whole over the past 40 – 50 years is a push to have local and state governments adopt neoliberal economic austerity policies, which include the following:

• THE RULE OF THE MARKET
• CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES
• DEREGULATION
• PRIVATIZATION
• ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD”

The DeVos family has been part of promoting these kinds of economic austerity measures in three main ways. First, they have provided millions of dollars to political candidates who embrace economic austerity policies. Second, the DeVos family gives millions of dollars to organizations which promote economic austerity, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Acton Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. The DeVos family funds these organizations through their foundations, thus allowing them to use non-taxed funds to promote economic austerity policies. The third way the DeVos family promotes economic austerity policies is by being part of groups like the West Michigan Policy Forum, Grand Action 2.0, The Right Place Inc. and the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce, all of which embrace the same economic policies of wealth expansion for the few and economic despair for everyone else.

The irony of all of this is that while the DeVos family has spent decades undermining local artists and the arts community, they are now swooping in to offer their services to assist art groups in order to make them more marketable and profitable. Just one more example of how sinister the DeVos family is and how they want to control so much of what happens in West Michigan.