The MacRostie Art Center: A hub for art in Grand Rapids
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Katie Marshall sits in front of a wall of art books covering everything from Frida Kahlo to Bauhaus design.
It’s the little art book library of the MacRostie Art Center in downtown Grand Rapids, where Marshall has been executive director for 13 years.
Marshall is from Grand Rapids, but as a kid never visited the art center, which has been around in different iterations since the 1960s.
“It seemed sort of intimidating or something,” Marshall recalls. “It was an art gallery, and I don’t have a background in art, so it wasn’t something that I came across much on my own.”
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Today, that factors into how Marshall runs MacRostie, an art space that serves a large chunk of northern Minnesota.
“We always try to have music playing or other things to make it just seem welcoming and not a place you have to come in and whisper or tiptoe around,” Marshall says. ”It’s very much a community art center and not some elite art gallery.”
The MacRostie programs more than 20 exhibitions a year. Currently on view in the Giinawind gallery is “Stories Between the Earth and Sky,” featuring prismatic paintings by Madison-based artist Sarah McRae, a member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe.
The center opened the Giinawind (Ojibwe for “we/us together”) gallery space in 2022.
“We’re right in the center of a lot of Native communities,” Marshall says. “That’s one of the reasons we started the Giinawind space. We felt like there was not a real visible presence in Grand Rapids for the Native artists community, and we wanted to make some space available and create a platform for that.”
In the gallery next door is “The Rocks Are Strange Here,” by Pono Asuncion, a Minneapolis-based illustrator.
Then there is the 32nd Annual Juried Show curated by Minneapolis artist Gordon Coons in the main gallery, which is on view until Sept. 27.
“For our juried show, it’s open to artists from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas, so we have kind of Upper Midwest range,” Marshall says.
They received 160 submissions of which about 30 are on view.
“It’s a great show. It’s one of our most popular ones every year, because there’s such a variety of work,” Marshall says. “It’s a really good combination of local artists, people that are familiar to us, and then lots of new names.”
Marshall says the arts scene in Grand Rapids has grown significantly in the past decade, pointing to the Reif Performing Arts Center, the Itasca Orchestra and Strings Program and Grand Rapids Players theater. MacRostie also partners with the city for “Artists in the Attic,” six-month artist residencies on the top floor of the historic 20th-century Old Central School building across the street.
“We think of ourselves as kind of a hub of the art scene,” Marshall says. ”We work to be a place where people can come together and experience art, make art, teach art, see exhibits and just be together in community.”
