Artwork Auction for Everytown
Hi Everyone,
It's harder than ever to make sense of the world lately. (Perhaps it's not meant to make sense, in which case: Excellent work, World, you are really doing your thing.) Things are so intense and I've a felt sense of the pointlessness of things, too. In a world of cruelty, how can there also be beauty? These contradictory truths live together, their angles interlock to the point of immobility.
Over the last couple of summers, we raised almost $35,000 for charities by auctioning off artworks on Instagram. We've donated money to food banks, the NAACP, SPLC, ACLU, the Okra Project, Ele's House, Stop AAPI Hate, the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation, and shelters for at-risk and homeless youth.
Being able to use my work to help people through an impossible year in a series of impossible years has brought comfort. It's my birthday this week. What a birthday means in such a dark time is not lost on me: It means nothing (just another day!) and it means everything (I'm still here!).
This year, I struggled with a long list of causes I wanted the annual summer auctions to support, but one kept bubbling to the surface: ending gun violence in America.
Auction
And so, this week I'll begin by auctioning off Omoplata 181, with 50% proceeds going to Everytown for Gun Safety. I don't imagine I need to tell you why their work is so important, but if you want to dive down a very depressing and angering rabbit hole, check out the statistics on the Gun Violence Archive.
The highest bidder will be sent this piece, Omoplata 181 (in Royal Blue 20" x 20" x 1"), and the money will be sent to an organization that can hopefully help us find a way out of this endless cycle of yet another mass shooting taking place.
I began the Omoplata series thinking about what happens when one set of curves interlocks on another set of curves — one on one axis and another on a second axis — and how those shapes would stop each other from turning. I am hardly a Brazilian jiu-jitsu student, but while watching MMA (mixed martial arts), I heard them describe a submission where you catch your opponent’s arm, using your legs, with a twisting motion that locks it in place. It occurred to me that I was doing something similar with the curved shapes.
It feels weirdly fitting for the time we're in now. Interlocking sets of curves, different axes connecting such that movement feels impossible. Art can’t fix everything but can help us to process it, feel it, recognize the cruel parts and appreciate the beautiful ones. We can only do what we can. Things will get better, or they won't, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't lean in as hard as we can to the better end of things: We should. We need to, whenever and wherever we can.
The auction starts on my Instagram page now, and ends at 9 p.m. EST on my birthday, Thursday, July 14. To bid, place your amount under the BID HERE comment.
Hang in there. Stay well. Lurch, sway, crawl, run, tilt, dance — whatever form of movement you prefer — toward better.
Best wishes,
Matt