About Our Upcoming Art*o*mat® Gig in Santa Fe:

I'd love to go ahead and publish an itinerary for when we leave and exactly where we'll go, but the truth is we are just not quite sure yet.  We're going to leave Tacoma on February 20th so we have plenty of time to get the Art*o*mat® machine (that we're now gonna call "Mat," thanks to Aunt MaryAnn for the idea) to Santa Fe for our hot gig at ARTsmart's ARTfeast. So here's a little of what ARTfeast is all about:

The weekend of February 24th-26th is "ARTfeast," ARTsmart's major annual fundraiser for art programs  and scholarships in Santa Fe's schools.  The first ARTfeast in 1998 included a handful of Santa Fe galleries that asked for donations during their Friday evening openings. Today, ARTfeast has grown to a weekend of artful events combined with sensational savories and drink, the proceeds from which benefit art programs for Santa Fe’s youth (they raised over $300,000 last year). Besides the weekend's events (the gala dinner, auctions, fashion shows, artful home tours, and eat-as-you-go gourmet gallery walks, and more), there is also a golf tournament in September and various community projects year-round.

The kids get to be involved by painting canvases for the gala dinner centerpieces and making "I Made It" plates. Each year, more than 1,000 elementary students create paintings and drawings on place mats of which 100 are selected to be transformed into unique ceramic plates which get auctioned off. Corky and I think that this program is amazing and that it's a great fundraising model that could be used in any city that needs help raising money for kids' art programs. We hope you'll look up this wonderful program and watch the documentary video they made about ARTfeast 2011 at www.artfeast.org (go to the About page and scroll down to the bottom for the link to the video).

A sample of the students' 2011 "I Made It" plates for the Artfeast auction.

So what will Mat, our machine,  be doing at ARTfeast? Our Santa Fe buddy, James Bottorff, happens to be on the Board of ARTsmart and also happens to manage the building that houses the ARTsmart offices called El Centro de Santa Fe. We had already volunteered to sell tickets to the weekend's ARTfeast events at the office on Friday the 24th (Corky and Laird had a great time volunteering for this last year) and he invited us to bring Mat along and tempt ticket buyers with Art*o*mat® tokens.  We're also honored to be invited to bring Mat and sell tokens at the Gala Dinner and Auction on Saturday night. We will be donating all proceeds to ARTfeast. We hope to go through lots of $5.00 art and create buzz for the Art*o*mat® program.  Wish us luck!