Artist chronicles demolition of Kensington School: ‘What is lost?’

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — After chronicling the demolition of Grand Rapids’ old Kensington School building in a series of photographs entered in ArtPrize, the artist hopes his work will inspire viewers to consider what the future of these buildings should look like.

Though he is now based in Grand Rapids, artist Zachary Trebellas grew up in Illinois and had no direct link to the Kensington School, also known as Adelante High School. The now-demolished building, which was at 1031 Kensington Ave. near Curve Street in the Black Hills neighborhood, was built in 1925, closed in 2004 and sat vacant for years. In 2023, Grand Rapids Public Schools decided to demolish the building and convert it to a green space.

“I think we all have stories in our hometowns of … things that we really like that were destroyed or got torn down. I know in my hometown, we have buildings from the 1910s which were destroyed when I was in high school. And that’s still just a gap in our downtown,” Trebellas told News 8. “I think I really connect with the idea of loss and of losing history that we will not get back.”

Trebellas discovered the Kensington School building on a bike ride. For ArtPrize 2023, he and collaborator Amber Bledsoe created a large-scale installation to honor the building, titled A Swan Song to the Kensington School Building.

For his ArtPrize 2024 entry, Trebellas again focused on the Kensington School building, but this time he tried a different medium. He began visiting the building week after week over the course of its demolition, taking photos with a point-and-shoot film camera along the way.

“I would always ride my bike there really nervously that it would be gone or that too much of it would be gone. I never knew what it was going to look like before I got there,” he said. “It was really heartbreaking. I could see them like trying to knock a wall down from the other side, and I would watch the wall, like, shake and things just fall off of it. And it was really hard to watch at one point.”

His goal, he said, was to “revere the building in its final days.”

“I’m trying to show it, even when it’s being demolished, in the best angle or in the best light,” Trebellas explained.

Now, “Grand Rapids Ruins” — a series of five shots arranged in chronological order — is being displayed at ArtRat Gallery for the duration of the art competition.

The first photo is an establishing shot of the Kensington School building in the early stages of the demolition.

“If you didn’t look closely, you couldn’t tell, but it already is being torn down,” Trebellas said.

The second photo shows the building from the back about halfway through the demolition.

“So you can see demolition equipment in the foreground and then the school in the background,” the artist explained. “They always keep the façade till the end with demos — (that’s) what I learned. So the façade is there, but we’re looking at it from the back and it’s just rubble on the ground.”

The third photo, taken on the same day as the second, is a close-up shot of a piece of the school’s cornice in the rubble.

“When I saw the photograph, I was taken aback at how striking it looks,” Trebellas said. “It looks so forgotten and dejected there in the rubble, but also beautiful and old.”

Trebellas took the fourth photo at the dump.

“It’s pieces of the school for sale,” he said.

The fifth and final photo is “the twin of No. 2,” according to the artist.

“It’s standing behind the school from the same exact angle,” he explained. “But now instead of the school being demolished, it’s just a field of, like, green plants.”

Trebellas hopes viewers approach his piece slowly.

“I think that’s the No. 1 thing that the public often does wrong is they move too fast. I watch people looking at art and I see how much they kind of zoom,” he said. “So I think really to take it slowly, to notice the small details. There’s things that I’ve caught looking at these photographs again and again I didn’t notice the first time. And to really think about, I guess, what is lost in a process like this.”

With several GRPS schools slated to close in the coming years — many of which have uncertain futures — Trebellas says these are important questions to consider.

“I want people to just take the situation seriously and think about, you know, is it OK to tear down a school? Maybe do they want a school to become housing? Do they want a school to become an office? I don’t know,” he said. “This is the time to think about it, because these things are going to start happening very quickly.”

Where the Kensington School building once sat, there is now a field.

“You would never know a school was there the way it looks now. It’s very erased,” Trebellas said. “And I would love to create more of a feeling of history.”

He told News 8 that he purchased several fragments of the building and worked with the demolition company to set aside additional pieces.

“I have a small collection in my garage of pieces of that school,” he said. “And I’m hoping to see if I can work with GRPS to put those back into the green space that they’ve made, maybe work with a landscape architect to think about how those could be integrated into the landscape.”

The artist, who is Greek American, said his visits to Greece have informed the way he thinks about ruins. In Greece, he said, many ruins are carefully preserved and designated.

“There’s just a lot of attention to their history and to their ruins. And sometimes I think that there’s an irony that as Americans we would go, you know, to Europe or to Asia or wherever … and we’re amazed by all these old things,” Trebellas said. “But I think I want us to turn that lens toward our own culture and say, ‘What do we value here and what do we allow to be destroyed? And if we have to destroy something, how do we then still connect what’s left to our history?'”

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