In 1910, Mrs. Della Foote Perkins helped establish the Art Association of Grand Rapids with a single mandate: build a permanent collection, open to all citizens. That civic instinct kept compounding. In 1969, Alexander Calder's *La Grande Vitesse* went up downtown — the first public artwork in the United States funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. When Meijer Inc. found a different site for a planned superstore in 1991, the original 70.7 acres became Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, which opened in 1995 and now holds Moore, Rodin, and Akamu across 158 acres. Then in 2009, ArtPrize arrived: any artist, any venue, any visitor with a vote, $500,000 in prizes, and 200,000 people the first year alone. Grand Rapids didn't stumble into an arts identity — it built one, deliberately, across more than a century.
