The competition was founded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s son and is heavily funded by her family, the leading philanthropists in ArtPrize’s location, Grand Rapids, Mich. While the event’s officials say that the family’s influence on operations and choice of participants is minimal, “‘Any artwork put into ArtPrize is going to be about ArtPrize, the DeVoses and Trump,’ said Eric Millikin, an artist in Detroit whose entry, Made of Money, used a weave of actual dollar bills and digital manipulation to produce portraits of accomplished people who died poor.”