• • •
The Talented Mr. Burge goes to Hollywood
(Originally published April 2016, in Alliance Magazine)
From making music and living on the Bowery, to having fun acting and exploring origami, West Michigan native Joshua Burge follows his passions. As with Chaos Theory, one action leads to another, culminating in an oblique but meaningful experience. But there’s more than passion at play here: In whatever he does, Burge strives for excellence. He’s worked hard and it’s really paying off. Here the GR-to-LA actor talks about his life before film and what’s happening now after the premiere of The Revenant in which he plays the supporting role of Stubby Bill.
The past rears its head
Burge’s audition for The Revenant almost didn’t happen. Picture this: It’s late August 2014, and Burge has landed in Calgary, Canada on his way to audition before Alejandro González Iñárritu—the award-winning Mexican film director, producer, screenwriter, and former composer—for a role in The Revenant, the $135-million Western revenge film. Burge is jacked up on adrenaline; the whole idea of auditioning for a role in a major motion picture is beyond his comprehension. He’s worked hard and received a multitude of rave reviews about his role as Marty Jackitansky in Buzzard. Clearly, Burge is on his way to hitting the big time. He can almost taste it.
Now he’s standing in the airport’s immigration/customs area. The authorities are checking the actor’s credentials, and they find something—a black mark on his record from long ago, an incident he’s not proud of. Canada is rather fussy about visitors. Burge is mild mannered, respectful, and has long ago paid his dues to society.
It doesn’t matter. An official politely tells Burge they prefer that he get right back on the plane and return home. The big audition is just hours away, and he’s so close to meeting Iñárritu. Burge cannot believe this is happening.
“The ‘me’ from that era would have said ‘screw it’. I used to be devil-may-care with my life,” says Burge.
But he isn’t that guy anymore.
* * *
Now it’s early January 2016 and Joshua Burge is sitting in my living room. He’s been in Grand Rapids for the holidays for a couple of weeks visiting friends and family, and he’s leaving in two days to return for Hollywood’s major pilot season. He’s been gracious to carve out some time to talk to me.
Although it isn’t cold in here, Burge stays bundled in his coat, scarf, and hat. My thoughts on this remain unspoken. He’s frank, funny, and well spoken. He is humble and unassuming despite the accolades he’s received for his roles in Ape and Buzzard. Now, with his supporting role in The Revenant (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy) behind him, Burge is in high demand, often with two or three auditions per day during pilot season. (He recently voiced a character for American Dad.) I ask him how it feels. He says he finds the whole thing surreal.
From flannelled beginnings
Life for Joshua Burge didn’t seem surreal at the start.
He grew up in the small West Michigan town of Cedar Springs (pop. 3,509 in 2010), which was originally established as a lumber town in 1856. It’s currently renowned for its Red Flannel Festival, held the last weekend of September and the first weekend in October.
As a kid, Burge wrote scripts and had all of his action figures playing out the scenes. “I always knew I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he says. “I’ve always loved the idea of play.”
Burge graduated from Cedar Springs High School in 1998. As a freshman, he got swept up in songwriting because he wasn’t good at academia; he attended lectures but didn’t do the homework.
“Music was a great way to express myself,” says Burge. “I decided to play music and hit the road.” It was around this time he became fascinated with New York City—the place where Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Tin Pan Alley all had their beginnings. Did it really exist?
“So much of what I loved was there and I wanted to see it,” he says. To do that, he needed money. Burge worked a variety of jobs—from clerk to cobbler—each of which he took seriously.
“My time is very valuable,” he says. “It’s finite. What I do with it matters to me. It’s a process to put in an application and interview—that’s effort.” Burge used the money he saved up to move to New York City when he was 19 years old. It was here that he fell in love with the concept of not driving; the subway system more than sufficed.
He did not bring a guitar with him and had no place to stay. The White House Hotel, a flophouse on the Bowery (described in the book, Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, by David Isay and Stacy Abramson, 2000) provided shelter for a couple of months. The flophouse had walls seven feet high, says Burge, and the ceilings were 11 feet high, so you could climb over the walls if you wanted to. Some of the “more intense” places had chicken wire over the walls.
Burge lived among alcoholics and heroin addicts during a time when The Bowery was undergoing transition. German tourists had just begun coming through on sightseeing tours, and gentrification was just around the corner. Burge found himself among filmmakers, poets, and other interesting people. He speaks of characters like “The General,” an individual rumored to be a Holocaust survivor.
“No one could understand a word he said, but he sure knew how to ask for a cigarette. There was a cool mix of people who lived there for 20 years or more. I loved hearing stories from old timers—of course, you take them with a grain of salt because who knows what’s true—but a good story is a good story.
“My time in New York was fun, it was a blast, very Dylan derivative. It was a cool time to be in New York City—the fall of 2000—with the Mets versus the Yankees, the Gore election time period. It was a different time. There were no cell phones, so I used pay phones to keep in touch with my parents. I try to be as honest as possible. I came clean with my parents about where I was and how I was living.”
That New York exists no more. On a subsequent visit after 9/11, “There were M-16s in the subways,” Burge says. “My friends had moved on. It’s super intense. The drive to go there is gone now.
“Everyone’s got their own goals,” says Burge. “I’m so far from perfect, my goal is to be a good human being. My focus is on doing what I can do and doing the best I can.”
Not a conscious choice
How does one chart a life path? Burge would say he didn’t. Like his brief residency inside the gritty underbelly of New York, his choices were born of short-term love affairs with a variety of interests. That’s not just flowery writing. He calls his interests “loves,” and when something captures his passion, he’s all in. “When you love them, you really love them,” Burge says of his interests. Not every passion demands the commitment necessary to survive streets far from life in Cedar Springs. For example, “There was a time before Buzzard when I explored origami,” Burge says, “but it didn’t stick.”
As suddenly as his interest sparks, his passion wanes, and he moves on to the next best thing. One exception: At 35 years old (born on the cusp of Aries and Taurus on Earth Day), Burge says that he is very much aware of his responsibility to the environment, especially as he gets older. He doesn’t drive—partially self-imposed and partially the result of his youthful indiscretion—so his carbon footprint is smaller than the average guy’s.
Now his current love is acting and one could ask if this passion will endure. At the beginning of what could be a major acting career, the creatively fueled Burge denies he was driven by any particular ambition; acting just “sort of happened.” As with his other loves, his intuition has led him here. While in high school, Burge became enamored with music. Later, he formed an ‘anti-folk’ band, ‘Chance Jones.’ All told, he played music for 15 years but hasn’t played in four. He rarely plays now. But his music and his acting are inextricably bound.
For when he was front man for Chance Jones, filmmaker Joel Potrykus (writer/director of Ape and Buzzard) filmed the band for a music video. The moment was pivotal.
“I was first a fan of Josh’s band and we had a lot of friends in common,” says Potrykus. “I had no idea if he could act, but anyone able to project the energy and persona he has on stage is a natural performer. There’s no inhibition up there, so I had a feeling he might be able to project some of that energy in front of a camera. Luckily, it turned out that he could act. He takes it very seriously and pushes himself. We instantly had a rapport, and we are on the same exact page, aesthetically.”
First came a voyeuristic short called Coyote. Next came Ape, Potrykus’s first feature-length film, on which a skeleton crew “ran gun.”
“Literally, we’d say ‘Hey! Great sunset! Looks good tonight, let’s shoot for a couple of hours.’ We had no schedule,” explains Burge.
Ape won awards at the 2012 Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, and brought well-deserved attention to Potrykus, who was recognized as Best Emerging Director-Filmmakers of the Present. The film was embraced by European audiences, but in the United States, not so much.
“It was a tough one to get American audiences to dig,” Burge says.
Buzzard praise
Production was very different with intense, dark Buzzard. As lead actor, Burge doesn’t hold back. IMDb Pro describes the plot line: Paranoia forces small-time scam artist Marty to flee his hometown and hide out in a dangerous Detroit. With nothing but a pocket full of bogus checks, his Power Glove, and a bad temper, the horror metal slacker lashes out.
“On Buzzard I wanted to amp it up as an actor,” Burge says. “We had a ‘bigger’ production team, a cinematographer, and we work-shopped the script before shooting. We took it to the next level and improved on things.”
“It’s important to work with people that understand your vision, and can talk the same language,” says Potrykus. “I give him very little direction, because he just ‘gets it.’ I give him a nod, he nods back, and we roll the camera. That spaghetti scene in Buzzard is all Burge. I didn’t write it that way. He just went for it with an appetite that I couldn’t have predicted. I just stood back, watching in amazement as he gobbled away. He’s fully committed. I can let the camera go and just stand back, waiting to see him surprise me over and over. It’s a true creative partnership.”
Buzzard was one of 19 films from around the world screened in the SXSW festival’s “Visions” category that showcases “audacious, risk-taking artists in the new cinema landscape that demonstrate raw innovation and creativity in documentary and narrative filmmaking,” according to the SXSW website.
“It was a whirlwind,” says Burge of the film industry’s reaction to his role in Buzzard. “Suddenly ‘management’ wanted me out in L.A. I got a text message from Joel saying to expect a call from the ‘agency.’ This was one week after SXSW. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go—all my friends are here. My girlfriend is here. I have a house in Grand Rapids. Then I get a phone call from L.A. asking me to self-tape an audition. Meanwhile, Joel is busy mixing sound on Buzzard because he still wasn’t satisfied with it.”
The audition was for a role in Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp. Burge didn’t get the part. “I just thought it was so wacky and crazy, and here we are living our lives in GR,” he says. Then the casting agency asked Burge to self-tape for a role in The Revenant.
“I’m thinking, nobody probably sees these things, but it’s a fun thing to do.” Burge never heard back about the first tape. The whole notion of being auditioned for a major motion picture by Iñárritu was so outside the realm of possibility that he didn’t take it seriously.
“And so, we enjoyed our summer, and I joked about being in the film as a fur trapper shooting a flintlock rifle with DiCaprio,” says Burge. “We talked and passed the whiskey around the campfire thinking about what to do with our lives.”
A quirky twist of Fate
In the fall, Burge received another request to self-tape an audition for the same film, different role.
“At this point, I didn’t know if I wanted to act anymore,” he says. “There were maybe some depression issues. I was thinking ‘I gotta get a job.’ Then a friend shows up and says I have to do this tape. I was blowing it off, not taking it seriously. These things never happen. My buddy says don’t squander this opportunity, embrace it and be grateful for what comes my way.
“I had to have the tape back to them by 10 a.m. because they were going to meet with Alejandro. Next, I got a call telling me not to shave. They got me a plane ticket to Canada to audition with the caveat that I had to be at the airport in two hours.”
As we began this tale, our hero was detained at the Canadian border. The authorities were denying him entry into the country. But Burge isn’t about to turn back now. There’s only one thing he can do: He pleads with the authorities.
“Finally they said I could go and audition but if I got the part, they wouldn’t let me back into Canada,” Burge says. “They held my passport and told me that I had to be back at the airport by 2:30 or they would put out an international alert for my arrest. I felt embarrassed and humiliated.”
This latest stressor ratchets Burge’s adrenaline up a few notches as he arrives for his audition. As dozens of actors wait their turns to audition, a production assistant asks him if he’d like to stay for lunch.
“And I can’t because I have to be back by 2:30,” Burge says. “I felt terrible about getting so close and having my past catch up with me. I ’fessed up to the production assistant, and she escorted me to the front of the line to audition for Alejandro.”
It seems Fate is just that twisted.
“I didn’t feel great about the audition at all,” Burge remembers. “I returned in time and picked up my passport. Canadian immigration was very kind and wished me good luck. That was on a Friday evening.
“On Monday I got the call, ‘Pack your bags.’”
FOX Studio’s legal department took care of the Canadian snafu, enabling Burge to film the role of Stubby Bill. The rest, as they say, is history in the making.
Into the Wild
Iñárritu filmed The Revenant in chronological order using only natural light, and many of the locations were remote. The physical demands on cast and crew were challenging, but Burge says things weren’t nearly as harsh for him. He had some trouble adjusting to the altitude at some locations, but the amazing landscape and the camaraderie and talent of the cast and crew overshadowed the discomfort.
“The whole experience was monumental,” says Burge. “We all became buddies, shot pool, played cards. The whole thing was a dynamic experience—I didn’t know what to expect after traveling 2,000 miles to work with the most talented people in the world. I thought I’d be chewed up and spit out.
“But everyone was so lovely from the get-go. I formed friendships and relationships working seven months, off and on. The whole experience—the insanely, seemingly impossible task of making the film, dealing with the temperature and elements—enabled us to form one bond.
“Everyone worked together to make this one incredible piece of work. It was all such a thrill and an amazing ride.”
Burge’s scenes were cut down in the final edit. “I believe I’m in a movie when I’m on the screen,” he says. “It’s Leo’s story, the revenge factor. The group of us who were fur trappers went on another journey. A film’s a film, and the director has to put it together the way that works best. The pacing is amazing. The film is beautifully shot.”
“Why me?”
Burge moved to L.A. in July 2015 and currently lives in Highland Park. He finds it easy to get around with rides from Uber, and if he needs to tape an audition, he goes to a tape house where, for $10, a professional reader will read sides with him, and the company will edit and send the tape where it needs to go. Five years ago, none of this was possible; these resources didn’t exist.
Burge has met with networks and casting directors, and he’s been on every studio lot. He walked past the tar pits after an audition one day. “It’s a great way to learn my way around L.A.; it’s trial by fire.”
And he’s still amazed at how down to earth people are.
“Leo, Tom, Alejandro—I never knew they would be so lovely and ‘normal.’ It was an honor and a thrill to be a part of such an amazing experience and embracing the unexpected. It’s an awesome part of my life that I never thought would happen, and I’m really happy that it did.”
At the party to celebrate completion of filming, Burge asked Alejandro, “Why me? With thousands of actors auditioning for the role, why me?
“And Alejandro put his arm around me and said, ‘Joshua, when you see the film, you will know ‘why you.’”
• • •
Of Ice and Men
(First published March 4, 2010, on rapidgrowthmedia.com)
In the ice trade, it is said that an ice carver puts in 17 hours a day to avoid working eight hours a day for someone else. For Randy Finch and Derek Maxfield, that’s a cold, hard fact.
Finch, 42, a self-described adrenaline junkie, and Maxfield, 39, are the co-owners of Ice Sculptures, Ltd., a business they say is the largest ice carving operation in Michigan and one of the largest in the country. The partners are self-taught ice sculptors and former Amway Grand Plaza chefs who share a love for all things cool.
“If you want to go into business together, be roommates first,” Finch says of his partnership with Maxfield. Coming from a man who plays with chainsaws, blowtorches, clothing irons, chisels, and grinders, that’s sage advice. But the heavy-handed tools are integral to the process of sculpting intricate, sometimes delicate, but always incredible, works of art.
Sculpting ice isn’t for the weak or faint-hearted. It is very challenging work that requires passion for the art. Besides using aggressive power tools to slice and dice the ice, ice carvers need stamina. The job involves heavy lifting, working in the cold, and working on the weekends.
“And you must have attention to detail,” says Finch. For precision, Finch and Maxfield use an automated, computerized sculpting tool. First, they digitize the design, and then program it into the computer. The machine does the rest with its robotic arm. They say that a client’s logo can be reproduced to within 1/10,000 of an inch in accuracy to the original artwork.
There’s No Business like Snow Business
Ice Sculptures Ltd.’s creations have been featured on the Discovery Channel and on Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” TV show and book. Their ice sculptures have been showcased in Chef Magazine, the National Restaurant Association’s magazine, MBA Jungle, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Maxfield’s work has won numerous ice sculpting competitions including the 2008 Tour of Champions and 2nd place at the Ice Alaska World Championships. His ice has been commissioned for movie premiers, the 35th anniversary of President Ford’s inauguration, and Governor Granholm’s Inaugural Ball. Maxfield and Finch have created displays for celebrities and entertainers from Aerosmith to ZZ Top. Maxfield also created sculptures for the 2004 Ryder Cup, the 2006 Super Bowl, the 2007 World Series, and the 2009 NCAA Final four Championships.
There are more than 15,000 designs in Ice Sculpture Ltd.’s database. If a client can’t find one he or she likes, Maxfield and Finch will custom-design one. Corporations such as Absolut, A & W Root Beer, Meijer, Rogers Department Store, and Grolsch Beer have promoted their products using Maxfield’s and Finch’s carvings. Corporate logos sculpted from ice packs a promotional punch, they say, and viral marketing is a key component. Photos of people interacting with an ice logo often end up on Facebook and other social networking sites.
Originally from Howell, Finch attended Oakland Community College in Detroit and went on to work over a 20-year period as department head and chef in the garde manger departments and fine dining restaurants for several prestigious hotel properties. (Garde manger means “keeper of the food” or pantry supervisor and refers to the task preparing and presenting cold foods, including ice sculpture.)
After he graduated from Rogers High School and attended classes at Grand Rapids Community College, Maxfield began his culinary career in the late 1980s at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, where he worked with several talented ice carvers, one of whom was Finch. While continuing to work as the sous chef at the Kent Country Club, Maxfield co-founded Ice Sculptures Ltd. with Finch in 1994.
Icebreakers
Finch and Maxfield’s creativity isn’t limited to static works — many projects feature intricate, moving parts. Finch loves creating kinetic sculptures, his favorite of which is the Ferris wheel.
Maxfield enjoys sculpting water in its solid state and then seeing the metamorphosis into a liquid when melted or a gas when it sublimates. A perfect example is the partners’ 2009 ArtPrize entry on the grounds of the Ford Museum. The team used a freezer truck and custom-built a double-pane glass window that wouldn’t fog up. A compressor kept the environment cold for three weeks. Art-goers were treated to live ice-sculpting demonstrations set to music everyday, with a total of 60 sculptures created.
Two months of hard work went into creating the ice for the ArtPrize project. To make colored ice, the pigments must be put in a 1/8″ layer, then flash-frozen to trap the color. Then it’s cut apart and reassembled it to create a sculpture. What began as a 20″x40″x10″ block of ice ended up as a delicate and intricate work of art.
“I know a piece is done when all the ice is removed that doesn’t belong and all the details are in place,” Maxfield said in their ArtPrize artist’s statement. “The essential ingredient for life itself, H2O covers a staggering 70% of earth’s surface. A human body comprises 60–70% water and a plant body up to 90%.
“Most sculpting is either additive or subtractive; ice lends itself to both. These displays are short lived but then again, in the greater scheme of things, so are we.”
Finch and Maxfield’s biggest challenge to date is the famous Mousetrap game commissioned by the Discovery Channel.
“A beautiful sculpture is one thing but bringing it to life with animation is a whole different ball game,” says Finch. “And because filming was involved, we had to make sure the whole apparatus could run a number of times.”
Getting away with one lucky shot was not an option. Laid out in a U-shape, the mouse trap measured 35 ft long and comprised 11 different mechanisms made out of more than 200 assembled pieces of ice, all sculpted from 4000 lbs of ice. Each of the devices were built and tested individually and then married together by adjusting their respective heights. The process took about four weeks, and the final design was not operational until just two days before filming was due to start.
A Totally Cool Profession
Finch always knew that he wanted to do something creative, and he’s always been kind of a ham. It was during his employment as a chef for a major hotel that he became enthralled with the art of ice sculpting.
“Back when I first started, this occupation didn’t exist,” says Finch. There were no books to guide them through the challenges of ice carving. So, Finch and Maxfield co-authored a textbook, “Ice Sculpting the Modern Way,” which is used by culinary schools around the world.
“It’s really a hobby that pays for itself,” says Finch. “When I have a day off, I’ll come down here and work on a sculpture for myself.” (“Here” is 188 Wealthy SE.)
Finch’s job as a chef has taken him to exotic locales. But there was a downside to living in the tropics. Ice was in short supply during his two-year stint as a chef on Peter Island, a Caribbean resort that is privately owned by the Van Andel family. Finch had three blocks shipped from Puerto Rico, but by the time the ice got there, only one block had survived the trip.
In Michigan, not a problem.
• • •
Pat Perry: Art by Experience
(First published February 28, 2013, on rapidgrowthmedia.com)
“The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.”
– Jack Kerouac
The man has got to travel. On his way to Ohio from a trip to the Catskills, Perry stops for gas and calls me from his cellphone. “I’d never been to the Catskills before,” he says. “They were beautiful. The rural roads were breathtaking.”
Beautiful, yes, but the trip had a specific purpose, too — a meeting of minds from all over the world. It was an Earth First! extreme extractive energy summit, during which participants discussed fracking, tar sands, and other environmental concerns.
“Last night, at this conference, a native American guy from Alaska living in Eskimo territory looked at some of my drawings,” Perry says. And with this one simple sentence, he conveys his sense of awe of the experience. “It was very intense hearing stories firsthand from the indigenous folks affected by mountaintop removal,” he explains. “It was a very special thing to witness. People are trying to adjust to climate change. We discussed ideas that need to happen now for things to change.”
Since August 2012, Perry has worked with the activist group, Beehive Design Collective, a group of graphic designers whose mission is, “To cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as educational and organizing tools.”
Which segues neatly into his life as an artist and traveler, faithfully documented on his blog:
I spent January in Michigan, mostly working on a couple of illustration projects. I have a studio for the first time ever, finally. There are lots of projects going on with the Beehive Collective. The call of the Catskills placed me in the heart of the beast at an anti-resource-extraction summit of leaders coming together to combat extreme extractive energy projects. It’s refreshing to be done with commercial work for a while and back in the territory where my heart and head is. I’m excited to share the projects I completed while at home. More sketchbook pages are being pumped out daily while on the road. Here’s a few film photos from Michigantown in January. Thanks for the continued interest and support, I’m tired and spent. It’s awesome.
Perry does, indeed, live a full life. He likes to hike, camp, ride motorcycles, read as much as he can, and listen to music. “I’m not into wasting time,” he says. “I value my time, and make sure I’m doing something meaningful as much as I can. When you wake up in the morning, you take for granted you have another day to live, but we have only a finite number of days to live.”
Here he let slip how many days he’s been alive. But I’ve been sworn to secrecy. More on that later.
Living a full life means constant travel, hopping trains (an activity that frightens his parents), hitchhiking (another source of parental anxiety), spending time under an overpass talking to a rambling stranger, and generally enjoying the freedom that youth and a debt-free life affords. He recently spent time in Alaska working with the National Park Services on a residency in Katmai National Park, and you can see his work from that time on his website.
“I’m free to do all this because I don’t have a student loan hanging over my head,” he explains. Besides rent, he doesn’t have bills (well, except for insurance and the cell phone), and he says he has a super-low overhead.
“You figure out cheaper ways to do things so that you have the freedom and time to learn and figure stuff out, like Thoreau [espoused] in Walden Pond. I have time to focus on things that are actually important,” says Perry.
Besides, fun is just so much more satisfying. “What’s fun is to see your work do something positive, help someone get through a struggle and show them that they are not alone, that other people have the same feelings they do. It just makes sense for me to do that with visual art.”
Perry’s projects often have a social commentary, but he also enjoys painting landscapes and other beautiful things. “Because I have an audience, I believe that as an artist, I should take responsibility for my art,” he says. “I need to find a balance. I love to make art for fun, too.”
Perry’s commercial art career began in the tenth grade when his parents hired him for little illustration projects. His father is a copywriter, and his mother is a remedial teacher. In his senior year of high school, he began doing serious commercial work, smaller projects at first, which matured and grew slowly over time.
“It started as a little seed,” he says. “It was never an overnight thing. It’s been a lot of work, and it took a lot of years to pick up, even though I’m young.”
He won’t tell me his age. It’s nothing personal—he doesn’t tell anyone. “It’s not on the Internet, either,” he says. “I don’t want my age to affect the reactions to my art.”
Fair enough.
Perry was born in Southeastern Michigan and grew up in Comstock Park. He says that he’s been making drawings since he was a little kid, keeping a drawing book and making silly drawings during class. Then in eighth or ninth grade, he decided that if art was going to be his vocation, he had to get serious.
A friend asked him, “What if you stopped watching TV and took that time and practiced anything, like a piano, everyday?” Perry took those words to heart. “I stopped watching TV, and pushed hard through high school,” he says. “I didn’t play sports. I participated in student leadership and the choir, but I spent all my other time drawing.”
His efforts paid off; he received merit and portfolio scholarships, which covered nearly all of his tuition at Kendall College of Art and Design. But after three years, he decided he’d had enough of formal education. “I just didn’t fit in,” he says.
“Besides, a lot of my friends are getting out of college with a huge amount of debt and then are trapped into getting a job to pay it off. That really stifles the creative process. When I was 18, I didn’t know any better and thought that going to college was the thing to do. But I don’t want to put my stamp of approval on the process. Especially when you’re doing something like artwork, maybe the goal is not to make a bunch of money, so maybe college isn’t the right thing anyway.
“But I learned a lot going to Kendall. It played its role.”
Both parents are supportive of his endeavors, even though they are not excited about his train hopping and hitchhiking.
“The most important thing to me is that I’m giving this my best shot—to make artwork that has a positive effect, to make the best artwork I can, to do things I like and be ethical about it,” says Perry. “I want to keep learning and keep progressing as an artist and as a human being. I would hope that I never stop bettering myself.”
• • •
Amenta: A Man of Riches
(First published April 8, 2010, on rapidgrowthmedia.com)
Perched upon a stool behind the counter of an authentic 1950s diner—smack in front of a deer diorama, mind you—Paul Amenta is a study in enthusiasm and humility. He’s a fascinating contradiction. So, too, is the space.
We’re in the old Grand Rapids Public Museum at 54 Jefferson St. SE. The deer are just as I remember them from more than a decade ago. It seems strange to be in such close proximity without a pane of glass to keep the wildlife in.
The other dioramas are also just as I remember them—with the exception of a few that have been cleared of flora and fauna and are strangely empty. These and other spaces are about to undergo “artist interventions,” which Amenta describes as a sort of “slippage between existing objects and artist interpretations.”
Amenta, the founder and former creative director of the ActiveSite non-profit art organization, and I are talking about his latest project: “Michigan—Land of Riches” (subtitled, “Re-Examining the Old Grand Rapids Public Museum”). More precisely, I’m trying to get a handle on what makes him tick, and he’s not cracking. Try as I might to steer the conversation to learn about his life as an artist, he deftly sidesteps and remains focused on the project. It takes me nearly three hours just to scratch the surface.
Amenta’s excitement is contagious, but I have to wonder just how everything will be in place in time for the opening on April 16. Right now, things are rough around the edges.
An Artistic Intervention
“Not a problem,” Amenta quips as he starts the tour. First stop, main floor.
Flanked by a flock of taxidermied birds and small mammals mounted in boxes of wood and glass, Amenta resembles a kid in a candy store. The boxed creatures were once used to teach elementary school kids, and each box has a carrying handle. They’re quaint and nostalgic and make me want to travel back to the 1940s, when many of the displays were created.
Right now, the boxed flock is stacked several high in the middle of the old museum’s main floor. It’s one of the artist interventions.
The Grand Rapids Public Museum has given Amenta and his collaborative group of artists access to everything—from archives to artifacts, taxidermied mice to, well, everything. They have nearly unbridled rein to do what they want, as long as they don’t harm the objects or surroundings. The exhibits, including dioramas, have stood untouched since 1996, when the public museum moved to its current digs on Pearl Street. The old building, used for storage, is now coming back to life for the duration of the exhibit.
Amenta has borrowed the exhibit’s title from an existing museum display, which is nothing more than a Michigan-shaped cut-out with tiny, color-coded push pins strategically placed to show museum-goers the locations of various geological formations. The display is laughable—devoid of color and texture, except for some small rock samples that were captured while in their prime and mounted on the wall. The display doesn’t even begin to convey the awe of geology.
Out of this dreary display, Amenta has mined a huge vein of creativity. The self-described “big-picture” man and about 200 students and more than 30 professors from seven area colleges are engaging the collections in fresh, new ways. Sixty to 70 projects overall.
“I like the poetic nature of the title,” says Amenta. “It’s flexible and can be interpreted in several ways—it can be ironic or literal.” Metaphorical, too, I muse.
“Besides, I’m a sucker for geology,” he quickly adds.
A Pop Culture Outsider
Originally from Hammond, Ind., Amenta, 42, moved to Grand Rapids with his family when he was in the sixth grade. Amenta’s been a problem-solver all his life. No television or Nintendo for this guy.
“I didn’t watch TV as a child, so I often didn’t know what the other kids were talking about when they discussed TV sitcoms,” he says. “I felt like a pop-culture outsider. Instead, I was super active and always outside. I’m restless and easily bored.”
Amenta says he learned to figure things out for himself because his dad wouldn’t help him build projects. He studied engineering and mechanical drawing in high school, but took up business at the former Grand Rapids Junior College, graduating with an associate degree in business administration. Perhaps his right brain then rebelled. How could he not study art?
Amenta went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in sculpture and printmaking from Grand Valley State University, meeting his future wife, Laura, while a student there. Like a number of other Grand Rapids artists before him, Amenta thought the city was nearly devoid of creativity in the mid-1990s. He says that he couldn’t wait to leave, and, in fact, moved to Seattle the week after graduation.
Restless in Seattle after two years, Amenta packed up and headed east to New York City to attend grad school, ultimately obtaining a master’s degree in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. And there, the formerly self-conscious, “introvert-trapped-in-an-extrovert’s-body” felt “amplified and right at home.”
“In New York, no one cares what you look like, who you are, what you’re wearing,” Amenta says. “No one cares.” Living in a tiny, 300-square-foot apartment that rented for $1,600 a month, Amenta learned very quickly that if he wanted to become known, he had to make things happen.
“Things don’t just come to you,” he says. “It’s up to you to get your work out there. In New York, there are so many creative minds in one place. It’s very competitive. You have to have a lot of energy and work hard.”
Don’t Get Lost
Amenta makes no bones about the fact that he and Laura, 41, returned to Grand Rapids in 2006 to raise their daughter, Eliana, 4, here because of the community’s family emphasis, lower housing costs and other amenities. As an adjunct professor at the Kendall School of Art and Design, he uses his New York experiences to instill savvy in his students.
“Students have to ‘get it’ or they will be lost,” he says. “I want to see young artists stay in Grand Rapids, not leave it like I did.”
Amenta says that there are so many ideas floating around in his head, he doesn’t know which one to work on next. “Up until a few years ago, I didn’t know how to relax,” he says. “I always had to be something, or I felt guilty.”
Once he’s focused on a project, Amenta won’t allow anything else to intrude. “My credit card payment will probably be late this month,” he says.
He may not be aware of it, but that business administration degree serves him very well. Each project finds him wearing all the hats—organizer, copywriter, public relations, curator, you name it. His projects are natural outcroppings of his installations.
“I have to do something like this or move back to New York,” he says. “I left Grand Rapids in 1995, and when I came back, the growth was unbelievable. But I always knew there was so much potential here. Now, finally, people are taking advantage of it.”
The exhibit runs April 16-May 15 at the Old Grand Rapids Public Museum at 54 Jefferson SE.
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