Meijer Develops a Lasting Legacy in the Arts

ELLIOT ZWIEBACH

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Frederik Meijer is leaving his mark on posterity, not only in the family name on the chain of stores his father started, but also in the form of something even more solid: sculpture.

“In 100 years I doubt there will be Meijer stores in a recognizable form,” he told SN in a 2000 interview. “But the sculpture will still be around, because those pieces are as close to forever as anything can get.”

The sculpture is on display at Frederik Meijer Gardens here, a 125-acre preserve at the edge of the city on Meijer-owned property. The site was once intended to house a Meijer store, but when a local civic group sought to buy part of the land for a botanical garden in the mid-1990s, the Meijer family donated the land and built its store a couple of miles down the road, Meijer told SN.

“The group's original goal was to build an observatory with gardens surrounding it,” he said, “but those plans turned out to be too ambitious, because they underestimated their costs and overestimated the donations they would get, so we took over the fund raising and it became very much our project.”

The decision to use the site for a sculpture garden along with a botanical garden resulted from Meijer's personal interest in sculpture, he explained.

That interest began in the early 1980s when Meijer met Marshall Fredericks, an American sculptor noted for his designs of animals and clowns. Meijer commissioned him to design a statue to commemorate his parents, Hendrik and Gezina Meijer — a statue of the ugly duckling looking up at a swan — which he donated to the town of Greenville, Mich., where the family business started.

In subsequent years, Meijer began buying some of Fredericks' pieces, then purchased additional pieces from other artists.

Over the years, Meijer said he had visited sculpture gardens all over the world, “and when the Meijer Gardens were being developed here, I felt that would be a good spot for the sculpture. So it was all really a fortuitous accident.”

Frederik Meijer Gardens, which opened in May 1995, is the permanent site for more than 100 works of 20th century sculpture, including pieces — by Fredericks, Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman and Deborah Butterfield — commissioned specifically for the facility.

In 1999 the Gardens added a major attraction — Il Cavallo, a 24-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a horse based on a design originally conceived by Leonardo da Vinci and built for the Gardens here by Nina Akamu.

Meijer, who was 80 at the time of the interview nine years ago, said that although he acquired his interest in sculpture late in life, he'd always been interested in the arts.

“We grew up during the Depression, but no matter how poor we were, we went to the Art Institute in Chicago and the natural history museum there. Even as I got older, my father would tell me to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or even just to the birds outside.

“And when I was older, I visited the Reijks Museum in the Netherlands and the Louvre in Paris, so I was always involved with art appreciation and preconditioned to do what I'm doing now.”