Rock Around
Video fun ahead:
For our first Family Street Art outing, the three oldest kids and Dad painted around 40 rocks and hid them all over town.
For our second time out, we painted around 40 sticks to scatter.
For our third project we painted around 40 leaves and did the same.
For our most recent Family Street Art project, we took things to epic proportions! Over the course of a full year, all six kids and Dad have been painting over 1,000 rocks. YES! 1,000. Not only that, we painted them all in matching pairs. Here are a few of the sets to give you an idea:
Right now, one rock from each pair is at the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum, gathered all together in a giant, sprawling display – a full kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and wild faces:
Now the fun part! Remember that all 500 rocks there at the museum have identical matching twin rock counterparts? We took these other 500 matching rocks and hid them all over the city of Grand Rapids in random locations for a GIANT community scavenger hunt during the world’s largest art competition, ArtPrize.
When people wander the streets of Grand Rapids during ArtPrize, they can be on the lookout for the hidden rocks. How many will they spot during the day? Who in their party has the fastest eyes? We're instructing folks that when they spot a rock during ArtPrize, they leave it where it's at and snap a photo. Then they can share photos on social media sites with the hashtag #RockAroundGR There is a wonderful growing community of families playing along in this giant interactive art game!
Here are some of our own documented photos below:
Update:
Out of 1,450 ArtPrize entries, the public voted "RockAround" into the Top 20. We went on to place 3rd in our installation category!
As the scavenger hunt we created was going on, we got quite a lot of local, national, and international attention. "Rock Around" was featured many places -- I won't post them all, but it included:
The Scary Mommy blog: here
The Grand Haven Tribune: here
The Grand Rapids Press: here
The Rapidian: here
Inhabitots: here
The UK Daily Mail: here
Dads and Design: here
National News:
and Local News:
People who played along and spotted hidden rocks posted close to 200 photos of their finds on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can see highlights in the next post: Here!
It was a fun, fun ride!