First Installation of art on display at DeVos Place®
 for ArtPrize competition

Grand Rapids, MI –Brenda J. Clark’s painting “DH Day’s Awe” is the first installation of artwork at DeVos Place for ArtPrize. The installation was done Thursday, September 10, 2009. 

Brenda is an Expressionist artist. The artwork she has chosen to display, an acrylic on canvas created in 2008. The piece is a painting of the DH Day farm that sits in the shadow of the Dune Climb and just over the dunes of Lake Michigan in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

DH Day Farm consists of 400 acres and can be seen from the top of the Dune Climb. The farm and the surrounding out buildings were built in the 1880s and 1890s. Day used the land to grow hay to feed his 400 hogs and prize herd of 200 Holstein cattle. 
 
Brenda has spent her life on a farm in the rolling hills of northeast Missouri. Through her life on the farm she quickly learned about light, form, texture and color. She has developed a need to paint on location. She says, “It allows me to satisfy the need to feel what I see through my paint.” Brenda paints on location 99.9 percent of the time, which gives her a feeling of self-indulgence.

Brenda received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984 from Truman Stated University in Kirksville, Missouri. She also received a Master of Fine Arts four years later in 1989 from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Brenda became a professor of Art at Michigan State University for a decade.

ArtPrize is an international art competition taking place in Grand Rapids, MI from September 23 through October 10, 2009. The artist with the most public votes wins the $250,000 ArtPrize.  Winners are selected by visitors who vote online at artprize.org or by text messaging while they view the art.

DeVos Place is hosting 29 ArtPrize artists. For more information please visit artprize.org/venue/id/93.