Art in Grand Rapids: A Calder, a Maya Lin and What Came After

La Grande Vitesse stands forty-three feet tall, fifty-four feet long and thirty feet wide, weighs forty-two tons, and arrived in 1969 in crates from a workshop in Tours, France. A crane put twenty-seven bolted sections together on the plaza over about five days. The name translates roughly as "the great swiftness", which is a pun on the city's own — the rapids the river was named for and which had been dammed out of existence long before the sculpture turned up.

Its real significance is bureaucratic and much more interesting than that sounds. The NEA had just started an Art in Public Places programme and had no precedent for how it should work. Grand Rapids went first. Every plaza sculpture in every American downtown that came after is standing in the footprint of this argument, and it was not a popular one locally at the time.

Five years later Calder gave the city a second work almost nobody has seen. Told that county employees hated looking down on an ugly flat roof, he offered a red, black and white design for it free of charge, and in 1974 it was painted across the Kent County Administration Building. It was reported then as the largest Calder painting in the world. You cannot see it from the plaza. You can see it from a window seat on the approach into the airport, which is the single best reason to sit on the correct side of a regional jet.

Go at dusk. The plaza lighting turns the arc into a silhouette and the office blocks around it stop competing.

Two blocks from the Calder, Rosa Parks Circle is the most-used public space in the city and most people who cross it do not realise they are standing in a work by the architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Maya Lin designed it in 1999 as a piece called "Ecliptic", built around the one thing Grand Rapids is named for and had lost: water. She put it there in three states. Water that flows. Water as mist, from a fountain that hangs in the air on a summer evening. And water as solid, in the form of the ice rink that occupies the bowl of the plaza through the winter. Set into the rink surface are fibre-optic points laid out as the stars stood over Grand Rapids on the first of January 2000.

Which means the correct time to see this is January, at night, with skates on, looking down. It is a genuinely strange experience and it costs the price of a skate hire.

The plaza had a dull name before — Monroe Mall Amphitheater — and was renamed for Rosa Parks in 2001. In summer it takes concerts, a film series and, for seventeen days each autumn, some of the largest ArtPrize installations, because it is the one downtown space with room for something enormous.

The Fed Galleries at KCAD are the closest thing the city now has to a kunsthalle, and they are free. About three and a half thousand square feet of exhibition space inside the Woodbridge N. Ferris Building at 17 Pearl Street NW — which is the 1910 federal building that housed the art museum from 1981 until it moved out in 2007. Kendall College of Art and Design runs the programme, so the shows swing between student work and genuinely ambitious curated exhibitions, and both are worth ten minutes of your walk.

Avenue for the Arts is the artist-run spine of South Division, the corridor locals call SoDiv, and it manages 106 Gallery at 106 South Division in a building owned by the housing non-profit Dwelling Place. Openings land on the first Friday of the month, generally in the evening, and that first Friday is the one reliable night in the calendar when several spaces along the street are open at the same time and full of people. If you can shape a trip around any single date, make it that one.

LaFontsee Galleries is the established commercial room, contemporary painting, sculpture and photography by regional and national artists, and it has moved out of its old address to 1504 Plainfield Avenue NE in the Creston neighbourhood. Worth the drive north if you are actually buying.

Beyond those, the corridors do the work: studios, framers and small rooms along Wealthy Street, through East Hills and out into Eastown. It is a scene you find by walking a commercial street rather than by searching a listings page.