“Wow, what is that?!” I cried, squinting my eyes against the setting sun.
We had been tromping around Frederick Meijer Gardens, testing the limits of the 5 p.m. closing time and our ability to bear the last gusts of winter. In trying to convince me to get a yearly pass, my roommate suggested I free myself from the grading prison that is the final weeks of fall semester and we soak in a little January sunshine. So I paid the twenty dollars and tried to enjoy myself.
The Japanese garden is less than stellar in the winter, though I could see hints of its beauty waiting to fully emerge in a few months. The sculpture garden, however, loses none of its grandeur when the natural highlights around it have gone dormant. Perhaps the Meijer family is more savvy than I give them credit for.
Kenneth Snelson’s “B-Tree-II” was not the first sculpture that caught my eye—that award goes to the towering figure uninspiringly named “Male/Female”—but it is the one I sprinted, or rather fast-walked, towards against the sun shining in our eyes. The elegant lines, reflective tubes accented by stainless steel cords, seemed to shift as I walked around and underneath it.
When we went again to the gardens, mostly because I have lived seven years of my life in Grand Rapids and have never seen the butterfly exhibit, unlike every child in a fifty mile radius under the age of ten, I squealed seeing “B-Tree-II” again. We got to see more sculptures, now that the weather was a balmy fifty degrees and we weren’t twenty minutes from closing time, and I admired Ai Weiwei’s “Iron Tree”, marveled at the movement of George Rickey’s “Five Lines Diagonal Jointed II,” and tried to mimic Keith Haring’s “Julia” pose (to my childlike delight). I wandered beneath “Aria” as well, the brilliant red and the massive steel reminding me of my first few outings to downtown Grand Rapids, posing in front of the Calder.
But there’s something in me that just loves a good shape.
Maybe it’s some primal instinct, a holdover from my grade school art classes or my failed stint as an art teacher, but I love geometric artwork. I’d collect the Artprize notecards from vivid paintings with lines and circles and triangles whenever I would finally drag myself downtown, and I ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the four squares spinning in the Japanese garden waters. It’s the same siren call that lures me to the abstract paintings in the MFA—the whisper that says, “Hey, if they can do this and get into a museum, maybe you can make some art too.”
I’ve tried a time or two to make my own geometric and abstract art. If a program can make something beautiful, then by golly I should be able to as well, right? It’s never as easy as it seems, though: my heart just doesn’t seem to express itself even in the simplest of shapes. No matter what I throw on the digital canvas, nothing seems to jive.
Instead, I’m trying to delight in the lines of others. Plus, as I remarked to my roommate, there is an insane amount of thought and planning that has to go into these deceptively simple-looking sculptures. “B-Tree-II” tubes are held entirely in place by the cords around it—there are no strands snaking their way through the tubes to hold it up. I’ll leave the complex calculations of mass, gravity, and heart to the artists; I’ll learn to be content with the gifts I have instead.

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a virtual computer science teacher and a proud resident of Grand Rapids. When she’s not brainstorming the newest project to inflict on her students, she’s cooking semi-vegetarian food, reading too many romance books, and playing rhythm games.