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N.Y. Artist Wins $250K at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids, MI – Ran Ortner of Brooklyn, N.Y., has won the $250,000 first prize in the inaugural edition of ArtPrize, the contemporary art competition in Grand Rapids that dispensed with a traditional jury of experts in favor of choosing the winner by public vote. Ortner, 50, won for his monumental three-panel oil-on-canvas painting “Open Water No. 24,” a 6-foot by 19-foot realist picture of the churning spray of ocean waves.

The $100,000 second prize was awarded to Tracy Van Duinen from Chicago for Imagine That!,a colorful mixed-media tile mural on the façade of the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum. The $50,000 third prize went to Eric Daigh of Traverse City for “Portraits,” three large photograph-like images made color pushpins.

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The winners — selected from a field of 1,262 artists whose works were displayed in about 160 venues in the city center — were announced tonight in Grand Rapids by Rick DeVos, the 27-year-old creator of ArtPrize. The remaining works in the top 10 each garnered $7,000.

Ortner said he was stunned by his win. “Wow. Exhilarating, captivating, ridiculous. Can’t get my head around it.”

It means a lot to him that those choosing his work were not professional art critics but people who were moved by his work. “There’s been a heart connection here,” he said.

And it has been good for those who voted, Ortner said. “All of a sudden, those who know nothing about art have an opinion that matters,” he said. “It really has a life larger than anything anybody anticipated.”

A mid-career artist who exhibits at the Causey Contemporary gallery in Brooklyn, Ortner’s resume describes a credentialed artist lacking in star glitter but with a slowly expanding track record. He has had a string of solo and group shows at galleries and art fairs across American and is represented in a handful of notable private collections and the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, N.C. He studied privately in Canada and the United Kingdom as well as at the Art Students League in NewYork.