Spare Thoughts: Home follows art

By Sophia Potter
Editor in Chief

Over the weekend, I went to Grand Rapids to check out the 15th ArtPrize event.

Going to ArtPrize has always felt like such a pilgrimage for me. I skipped school to visit the first ArtPrize in 2009 as a birthday present from my mom. To be honest, this began a long path of putting all else aside for the arts.

When I first left for college in 2015, I never gave it a second thought when I said I was going “back home” for the weekend instead of “to Grand Rapids.” This began to change a few years later when I decided to take a break from school, but to keep living here in Lansing.

In many ways staying here was a more convenient option. I thought a lot about the choice at the time, though, and for me it was always about more than that: Lansing had become home to me.

Having this realization for the first time was almost sad for me then. It was hard for me to see then that there are many places that occupy different versions of home for you over your lifetime.

This is probably true even for people who stay in the same city their whole life: the first house they ever live in, the library down the road, the park they meet their friends at after school all feel like home in their own way.

Heading back home for ArtPrize and finally studying art here at LCC have both helped me see that at least for me, home is where the art is. Art connects me to the community, and community is what makes any place – physical or otherwise – feel like home.

Maybe I’m lucky in that besides being a passion of mine, art is special because it naturally brings people together. Part of the magic of ArtPrize is the scale and number of interactive entries there are each year.

I really do believe that whatever your passion is, if you can find a community for it, a home will follow.