For Days 25-28 of 30 Days of Kindness, we hosted our first ever art show! Making this a true community event, we had recruited the help of nine local artist, and looked to raise money, not for ourselves, but for Opportunities for Otsego, a great social service organization right down the street from us.
As cool as it is to have a newly remodeled building, it's a bit of a drag to be greeted every day with bare walls. We wanted to fill our space up with beautiful art while helping out a deserving organization. I have never put on an art show before, and I've only been to a few, therefore, I thought this would be as simple as hanging a few pictures on the wall and calling it a day. I was wrong.
Turns out there's a lot more work to putting on an art show than just hanging art. You have to look for local artist, arrange art drop off and pick up times, promote it by making flyers, hanging up the flyers downtown, and of course, you have to do the standard newspaper and social media plugs. With all the work that needed to be done, I barely had time to get the art hung before the doors opened, but I still managed to pull off a successful show.
Since I put so much work into the art show, I decided to extend it until Thursday, instead of just keeping it open for one day (while still doing our regularly scheduled acts of kindnesses). The intent was to raise more money for OFO. But not all the money went to OFO, at The Redemption Movement, our heart is to be a church that doesn't stop at being friendly towards local artist, we also want to be able to support artists financially. Whether it's an art show or a rock show, we achieve this by making our space available for free and giving the artist all the door money, or letting them keep all the money from the art sale (unless it's a benefit show like this one). By the end of the week, we raised $49 for OFO, and several of the artist also made a few bucks off of their work.
The best part for me was to see the old storefront filled with beautiful art that we could never afford if we had to purchase it (including Stacy Brock's psychedelic piece that took up 36 square feet of wall space). The art that didn't sell remained on the wall for our Grand Opening (the following Friday), all the beautiful art helped make our much anticipated Grand Opening even more special.
A big thank you goes out to every artist who participated: Jim Seymour, Joe Hamilton, Abbey Koutnick, Chris Chase, Jen Jump, Stacy Brock, Donna Wessel, Garland Mallette, and Michael Shirk.
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