La Grande Vitesse: Red Steel and a City's New Identity
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
The forty-three-foot-tall red steel sculpture standing in the plaza ahead of you has a French name that translates, deliberately, as both the great swiftness and the Grand Rapids. Alexander Calder named it La Grande Vitesse, a bilingual pun honoring the city that commissioned it, and when it was installed in June of nineteen sixty-nine, it became something that almost no American city had ever seen: a piece of major museum-quality sculpture placed in a downtown plaza, paid for with public money, intended not for collectors but for everyone who walked by.
It was the first work funded by the Art in Public Places program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the program that went on to place major sculpture in cities across the country. Grand Rapids was the test case.
A panel of city officials and nationally recognized art experts selected Calder for the commission in nineteen sixty-seven. Calder completed an eight-foot scale model in nineteen sixty-eight. The full sculpture was fabricated in Tours, France, at the Biement foundry, shipped across the Atlantic in twenty-seven wooden crates, and reassembled on-site in Grand Rapids over five days. It weighs forty-two tons. It is painted in Calder's signature red, a color he used consistently on his outdoor stabiles.
It would be tidy to say the city embraced it immediately. Some did. The dedication in June of nineteen sixty-nine drew a crowd and a civic celebration. But Grand Rapids in nineteen sixty-nine was also a city still processing the civil unrest of two summers before, trying to figure out what kind of place it wanted to become.
The sculpture answered the question over time. Its abstracted form appears in the city's official logo. Locals call it simply the Calder. Weddings, rallies, concerts, and protests happen in its shadow. It has become, without anyone fully planning it that way, the symbolic center of the city.
