(Community Matters 194) Day Trip: Frederik Meijer Gardens Getaway

Charles Burke, president and CEO of Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, discusses why this day-trip Grand Rapids destination feels like a reset for your mind and a memory-maker for your family. Burke explains how the Gardens feels like many places in one and has a little something for everyone at any age. 

Episode Resources

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park Website

ABOUT COMMUNITY MATTERS
Former WBCK Morning Show host Richard Piet (2014-2017) returns to host Community Matters, an interview program focused on community leaders and newsmakers in and around Battle Creek. Community Matters is heard Saturdays, 8:00 AM Eastern on WBCK-FM (95.3) and anytime at battlecreekpodcast.com.

Community Matters is sponsored by Lakeview Ford Lincoln and produced by Livemic Communications.

Transcript

Welcome And How To Listen

Richard Piet 0:01

This is Community Matters service of Lakeview Ford Lincoln on Saturdays at 95.3 anytime, Battle Creek Podcast.com. And we're glad you found us wherever you are. You can also hear us on your devices easiest by going where you get podcasts and typing Community Matters Calhoun County. And then you'll find it. Follow us. You'll get a little alert when these episodes come about. Boy, it's summertime, and maybe you have some weekends available to go exploring, or perhaps uh maybe even a weekday available to go exploring. Maybe

A Summer Day Trip Worth Taking

Richard Piet 0:40

you should consider the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids. Not all that far away, and lots to see, as we'll learn from Charles Burke, president and CEO at the Fred Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. Hello, Charles.

Charles Burke 0:57

Hi, Richard. How are you?

Richard Piet 0:59

Great. Thanks for this chance. You know, I presume there's folks within the sound of our voices who are saying to themselves right now, I know Frederik Meijer Gardens is there, but I've not been there. Or they say, Man, you know, it's been years since I've been there. Remind us what it's about and what folks can expect.

Charles Burke 1:24

Yeah, you know, I think Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park is really one of those places that sticks with you for a very long time. If you haven't been in years, it'll come back because it's part of kind of your ethos as a human being. It's a weird, wonderful place. It's, yes, a museum, it's a sculpture park, it's a botanic garden, it's a display garden, it's a children's garden, uh, and it's an amphitheater, all kind of mixed into one. I lovingly like to say it's very much like a cultural destination, much like a maybe a familiar store to many of us, where you can buy a pineapple on one hand and walk out with a hose on the other. And you know, there's something for everybody here. And it's just a wonderful place, whether it's strolling through the sculpture park or taking our trams through the sculpture park, kind of considering life itself in our bones eye garden or our Zen garden, or taking in a concert in one of our great eclectics mixes of really world-class artists that come through here. So just an exciting, wonderful place. And I don't think that really is summer without visiting Meijer Gardens.

Richard Piet 2:40

You said eclectic when describing the acts that come to perform, but there's a sense of that across the whole place, it sounds like.

Phones Down And Family Memories

Charles Burke 3:05

Yeah, we're pretty proud of the I this intentionality that we offer here uh in terms of, you know, put your phone away for a little bit, other than as a camera and posting online. But this is a place where you can come as a grandparent or as a couple or as a parent or as an aunt and uncle. It's really an intentional space to escape, have fun, and perhaps lower your blood pressure a little bit. One of the things I'm just genuinely excited about, we just renovated a portion of our Lena Meijer Children's Garden. And as part of that, we added an ice cream parlor. And I can't tell you how many ice cream cones we sold, but you know, you sit there eating an ice cream cone, having just old-fashioned conversations gathering around, but you also happen to be looking at works by Beverly Pepper, Tom Otterness, Dale Chihuly. And it's a bit surreal to hear the giggles of kids and eating a fantastic ice cream cone, but at the same time just being surrounded by nature and art and really intersectional space. So, yeah, it's it's intentionally about uh connecting to the human spirit and creating memories for families and for for peoples of all ages.

Richard Piet 4:24

Is that consistent with the vision that Frederik Meijer had? And I presume it is. Has it grown beyond that, would you say?

Charles Burke 4:33

Yeah, I think uh Fred truly had this in mind when we opened the park back on April 20th, 1995. He said he hopes that this park is a place where we all breathe the same air, we are all on this planet together, and perhaps life could be a little better because of this park. And there was really an enlightened mindset that Fred brought to the vision of this. And I think our challenge, not just as Meijer Gardens, but as West Michiganders, Southwest Michiganders, Michiganders, Midwesterners as a whole, is where can you come and experience something that is just intentionally of quality and that we can put things away. It's just an experiential campus, an experiential engine where I think the biggest takeaway you can have is, oh, I had a great time, I had a great memory. Uh let me tell people about it and come back over and over again. And I think that was really in Fred's heart when he started all of this.

Chihuly Glass Takes Over The Gardens

Richard Piet 5:39

You mentioned Chihuly in that August list of artists to which you referred a moment ago. Chihuly is a big part of your exhibit this summer.

Charles Burke 5:48

We have, interestingly enough, uh Dale's and his work has been connected with us for from the very beginning. We were the first botanical garden in the United States to take on one of his grand exhibitions. And this is the third time he's been here, and there's a very special bond between Dale's team and his exhibition team and this garden. We have a series of 12 to 13 outdoor exhibition spaces. We have a massive indoor exhibition space, and frankly, it's the only place this year that you can see this in the United States. The only other place that you can see it on the planet, and it's much smaller, is in Venice, Italy. And so uh we've been excited to share this. This is a wonderfully colorful, vibrant, fluid collection of glass pieces inspired by nature, by culture, his legacy. And he's one of those people that you just go, wow, how did they do that? And if you don't know the name Dale Chihuly, we encourage you to go to our website, and once you see a work, it's iconic. You're gonna go, oh, I've seen that. I've seen that in a hotel, I've seen that across the seas, I've seen it a variety of places. He is one of the preeminent, I would say, uh, glass artists in the history of mankind, and he's really at the the you know last stages of his career coming to fruition as a master of joy experience, and we're just so delighted that it can be here. So it'll be here through November 1st, and it takes time to just soak it in, and it really a special moment that it can be here in Michigan.

Richard Piet 7:39

I think you nailed that. The experience that you have very often is you look at it and you say, How do you do that? Uh the glass pieces are unbelievable. And you know, if you don't have experience with glass, especially you look at it and say, How do you make that happen? It's amazing.

Charles Burke 7:58

Yeah, it is. And I've had the pri privilege of actually going out to Seattle to a studio, and I've met with him a number of times, and I've talked to his studio and the and the people that are his partners as part of the studio. But think about glass, especially colorful glass, it's bended to all these shapes. And we take it for granted sometimes because there's such mass production. But in all, glass is sand and heat, and that has been combined in a series of steps, molded or blown by people who know how to do it. And then in Dale's case, because of the facilities are so large, or the the furnaces that he pulls them out are so large, he's able to stretch the boundaries of physics. And in terms of where is that edge uh between breakage and thin and strength, and so it's a really dichotomy of uh shape, energy, tension, uh fluidity, and it it's it looks like it's just been born out of the earth. He's unique in that pushing that boundary, and that's where I think there's a lot of resonance with us of again back to kind of Fred uh Meijer, who was a titan of the industry, but he was in a unique space to say, hey, what if we tried this? What if we tried this? What if we took a garden and we took a sculpture park and we took an amphitheater and mixed it all together? This was his palette where he pushed uh you know all the energy of the world out there. And uh so there's a real linkage of creativity with these two guys, and uh, we're really proud that we have that relationship with Dale and his team.

What It Takes To Install Art

Richard Piet 9:46

I imagine it takes some doing to get one of these exhibits like this scheduled and in place. You have pointed out you have this relationship with Chihuly now that maybe it comes a little bit easier than it did in the past. But the point is there's a lot of preparation and work that goes on behind the scenes for this, right?

Charles Burke 10:06

Oh, it's insane. I mean, when they put these pieces together, so there is one when everybody comes to visit us at the entrance of uh the building, and it's a Smithsonian-level building. I mean, uh, interesting fact, you know, the people who were the architects for our uh new entrance that opened about five, six years ago are the exact same architects that just opened the Obama library. So world-class, just I mean, it's it's Smithsonian level to stand the test of time. But standing there in front of it is this lime green icicle totem, if you will. And it's a tower that's 30 feet tall, and the armature is steel within. It has 1,800 pieces of glass, and each piece of glass is maybe three feet long. And we hope that this is our new home for it, but it can stand the weather of Michigan, it can stand the test of ice and wind and snow, and we're just I mean, it's fascinating to see kind of the engineering side of this merging with the creative side of this. Nobody would have ever thought to say, hey, let's take lime green, almost neon color, these shapes, 30 feet tall, and a spiky shape, and stick it in the middle of an English perennial garden. I mean, again, pushing boundaries of color and scale. Uh, and I think it's just truly wonderful that it happens to just be here in Michigan.

Richard Piet 11:37

How about that? So we get a chance to see that between now and November 1st at the Frederik Meijer Gardens.

Quiet As Medicine In A Noisy World

Richard Piet 11:45

You talked about disconnecting from your phone at least enough of it so that maybe you can still take a photo and post later, perhaps, about what you've experienced at the gardens. It is an opportunity, isn't it, to escape from the noise of today, whatever that means, whether it's simply just all the messages we get at once and and those sorts of things, all the way to that which may be stressing us out. This is an opportunity, isn't it?

Charles Burke 12:18

Yeah, I I mean I think that's a profound observation. And you know, I come from a music background. Uh I originally was um a music teacher in the public schools, and then became an orchestral conductor of all things in Detroit. And one of the things both before I became a leader of nonprofits, but one of the things that I always noticed was, you know, there's two levels of volume in classical music, forte, which means loud, and piano, which is soft. But you know, if everything is forte loud, how do you know that that is loud? And so you have to have quiet before the storm, you need to have the silence to buttress, if you will, the bombacity of something. And and so I think in our lives right now, at least I think that whether it's in a podcast, not this one, of course, but other podcasts or things that you listen to on the radio, there's so many algorithms that are you know designed just to be in your face, connect in a way that is driving a sale. And to have the moments of sublime, the quiet moments, I think it really kind of hones in on as to who we are as humans. And I think about like the great Beethoven Ninth Symphony at the last moment before the Ode to Joy starts, and if someone goes out and listens to it, uh it's in the fourth movement, about 12 minutes in, and there's a big fugue, and it goes down to a level, and it's a single horn and an oboe, and it is the quietest moment to pull the audience in and to say everything comes from silence, and it but there's energy in that, and then all of a sudden it explodes. And that's where I think Meijer Gardens is really trying to be both the explosion, but a contextualization of the human spirit of need for quiet. And that's in the Japanese culture, that's forest bathing. Here we have art bathing, and we just want you to rest, to be, to build memories, to hold a hand, uh, to hear the laughter of kids. It's something, unfortunately, is becoming more rare in society, but we're very intentional here about preserving that and lifting that because I think it's the best medicine we can have for today.

Richard Piet 14:55

Boy, I have to just take a second and let that sink in because you've drawn a uh picture in the theater of the mind about this, and you've got us turning our minds about it. But it is, uh, to your point, a way to escape and take a moment to take a breath and think a little bit more, perhaps meaningfully, about things. And maybe this is the best place to do it, right? The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. You mentioned 12 to 13 outdoor exhibits. Of course, your indoor area is significant and open when the weather isn't so great, right?

Charles Burke 15:34

Which could be tomorrow for all we know in Michigan. I'm surprised it's not snowing right now.

Richard Piet 15:38

Well, I say that because somebody's gonna click the play button on this at some point when it's not summer, and maybe they are thinking twice about it, but you're there for this escape even then.

Charles Burke 15:50

One of the most fascinating times, and you know, we're hardy Michiganders. Uh I I grew up on the East Coast in Washington, D.C. And we just my wife and I decided to stay in Michigan after attending graduate school at University of Michigan. And you know, you do have to, you know, January, February, March, you got to be a dedicated person, and you've got to embrace nub's knob and boying and skiing and all the things that make us hardy. And this is a perfect place. And during that period of time, we have one of the largest indoor conservatories in the state, if not the largest, about 15,000 square feet. And every April, March, into February, we release about 10,000 tropical butterflies. And people walk in, and it is the respite. It is the vitamin D of the soul to have a butterfly land on you and to be in this tropical temperature where the worst thing about your day is coming out and your glasses are steamed. And it is really remarkable to have that four seasons approach to everything. And then immediately preceding that, you know, we have this wonderful light show called Enlightened. And that's an outdoor walking path in the middle of winter, right around the holiday season, with lasers and uh sculpture being lit and songs, and it's just a really wonderful holiday celebration on steroids. You wear your snowsuit to go out, walk around, have a hot cup cup of chocolate, and then you walk in and you see a traditional train set inside the space. So that that's what my hope is for everybody in the Midwest, because I know this podcast reaches around the world, is to say, think of this institution as a four seasons oasis for the soul. Think of this as a place that you can go to a concert. You can see great artwork indoors and outdoors. And this is a place where you can have steamy glasses or a really great ice cream cone in a children's garden. It's just a delightful, cool space. It's hard to describe through narrative. You have to experience it to believe in.

Link In Show Notes And Farewell

Richard Piet 18:09

And that's where we'll leave it. Meanwhile, the link to the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park is in the show notes for this episode of Community Matters. And we invite you to click through and do as Charles says. Uh figure out what turns you on most about it, and then make the plans to visit Grand Rapids and the Fred Meijer Gardens. Charles Burke, thank you for this escape for a little bit, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Charles Burke 18:34

Thank you, Richard. You're really great. Appreciate it.