Chris LaPorte
Statement
Chris LaPorte is a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based figurative artist whose monumental graphite drawings investigate the histories, symbols, and collective memories embedded within institutions, communities, and the people who shaped them. Working in 2H pencil on cotton fiber paper, he creates large-scale works that transform drawing into a medium for historical inquiry, public storytelling, and commemoration.
Many of the drawings are site-specific, developed for and installed within institutions whose histories they examine. Drawing from historical photographs, archival materials, and extensive research, LaPorte spends months constructing images through thousands of individual marks. He works closely with archivists, community members, and institutional stewards to uncover stories, figures, and moments that continue to shape a place long after they have passed from view.
His subjects range from workers and civic organizations to religious communities, ceremonies, and collective gatherings. Whether depicting ice house workers, World War I cavalry, Dominican sisters, marching bands, or generations of employees assembled into a single field, the work is driven by an interest in how communities construct identity through shared histories, rituals, and symbols. Rather than documenting the past, the drawings seek to reconstruct and reanimate it, bringing overlooked histories into contemporary public view.
The process is slow. A single drawing may three months to a year to complete. LaPorte understands this sustained, repetitive labor in the same register as hand-carving stone: a meditative practice that demands attention, endurance, and presence. The time embedded in each drawing mirrors the time it attempts to recover. Through this accumulation of labor, drawing becomes an act of witness.
LaPorte traces his influences to the Impressionists, who demonstrated that a single surface could hold both abstraction and resolution, and to monumental works such as Monet's Water Lilies and Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals, where physical scale becomes a mode of argument. His work operates on a similar premise: that a drawing large enough to fill a wall, and slow enough to require months or years of sustained labor, can make a claim on public memory that a smaller or faster work cannot.
Bio
Chris LaPorte is a figurative artist working in monumental graphite drawing. Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his practice explores history, collective memory, civic identity, and the human stories embedded within institutions and communities.
LaPorte has exhibited nationally and regionally, including solo exhibitions at Reynolds Gallery at Texas A&M University, Batdorff Gallery in Big Rapids, Michigan, and venues throughout the Midwest. His honors include First Place at ArtPrize, the Grand Valley Artists Award, the LowellArts Partnership Award, and the Roulet Medal from the Toledo Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of Amway International Headquarters, the State Masonic Lodge Charitable Foundation of Michigan, the Dominican Sisters of Aquinas at Marywood, and the City of East Grand Rapids.
In addition to his studio practice, LaPorte serves as Associate Professor of Art at Aquinas College, where he has twice held the position of Interim Chair of the Art Department. He lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan.