Grand Arts was a nonprofit contemporary art space in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, whose mission was to help national and international artists realize projects considered too risky, provocative or complex to otherwise attract support. It was co-founded by Margaret Silva and Sean Kelley in 1995 and operated until 2015 with sole funding from the Margaret Hall Silva Foundation. Facilities included a 4,000-square-foot fabrication studio, exhibition spaces, offices, and an on-site apartment available for visiting artists.
History
Margaret Silva and Sean Kelley co-founded Grand Arts in 1995 to give artists "a place for radical experimentation, without the constraints of too little time and even less money". Kelley left Grand Arts in 2003. Stacy Switzer served as artistic director from 2004 until the gallery's close. In total, Grand Arts produced 90 exhibitions with more than 120 artists. Projects often took years to produce, from concept to realization, and the organization's full-time staff tended to each phase of the process: research, design, fabrication, programming, publicity and beyond. Grand Arts' practice of long-term collaborative project development is in part what distinguished it from other granting organizations, according to Switzer: "That's what was special about the Grand Arts process. It wasn't that an artist would propose something and we would fabricate it according to the artist's specs. Often, there was a long conversation about how to push, pull, and tease the idea, pull out the most provocative threads and find other people in other fields who could help us enhance it in other ways". Following exhibition, projects produced at Grand Arts belonged solely to the artist. The works were often then exhibited in museums, commercial galleries and/or art fairs. For example:
Isaac Julien's 1999 Long Road to Mazatlan was co-produced by Grand Arts and ArtPacein 1999 and exhibited as one of two Julien works at Tate Britain in 2001, when the artist was short-listed for the Turner Prize.
Cody Critcheloe/SSION's feature filmBOY was produced by Grand Arts in 2010 and screened at Peres Projects, in Los Angeles and Berlin; Smart Museum of Art, in Chicago; Hole Gallery, in New York; and Vyktor Wynd Fine Art, in London.
The Propeller Group's 2015 A Universe of Collisions — Grand Arts' last-ever show — was included in the Venice Biennale that year.
''Problems and Provocations: Grand Arts 1995-2015''
In 2016, Grand Arts published Problems and Provocations: Grand Arts 1995-2015, co-edited by Stacy Switzer and Annie Fischer, with a foreword by Margaret Silva and an introduction by Switzer. The book chronicles 30 of Grand Arts' projects — works by figures including Alice Aycock, Alfredo Jaar, Isaac Julien, William Pope.L, Sanford Biggers, Laurel Nakadate, Stanya Kahn, and Tavares Strachan — with archival materials and project documentation presented alongside newly written anecdotes and reflections by artists and other collaborators. Essays by Pablo Helguera, Iain Kerr, Emily Roysdon, Gean Moreno and Rob Walker consider the models, practices and ethics of art institutions. A critical study conducted by the research studio RHEI identifies and describes Grand Arts’ unorthodox organizational model.
Successor organization
In 2016, former Grand Arts associates Stacy Switzer, Lacey Wozny, Eric Dobbins and Annie Fischer relocated to Los Angeles to develop a new organization named Fathomers, similar in mission to Grand Arts but with a focus on long-term thinking and transdisciplinary practice. Fathomers' founding board members are Margaret Silva, Andrew Torrance and Glenn Kaino. The organization's first project is a seven-year collaboration with artist Michael Jones McKean.
