GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — I first met Rick Beerhorst in 1986, when he was a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. One of his teachers was Peter Bodnar, whose small, quirky, symbolic abstractions with a spiritual undercurrent — they share something with Jain cosmology — have flown under the radar for many years. I know of two other artists who studied with him and hold him in high regard: Christopher Brown and Tom Lieber.