Little Free Art Gallery

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Dear Little Free Art Gallery,

If "everybody is an artist" as Joseph Beuys said, and people like you repeat ad nauseum then why aren't we all making art all the time?

Sincerely,
An Art Collector & Investor

Dear Art Collector & Investor,

People do…but, we don't call it Art.

Growing up we have learned the lesson well: Art is something only special people with special insight and privileges, called Artists, get to spend their time doing.

Meanwhile, the rest of us pursue our "crafts" and "creativity" from day to day in countless beautiful, useful, and life-affirming ways, and leave the "Artists" to themselves.

If the Big Expensive Art Gallery doesn't want my creations, I build a Little Free Art Gallery and use it to give away freely the things that I make as I try to make my life and world a more beautiful and satisfying place.

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Mission Statement

Recognizing that most people rarely if ever engage directly with living artists and new, original works of art due to economic and class barriers and other factors, and seeing how we often fail to realize our own artistic abilities for similar reasons, the Little Free Art Gallery Project seeks to deepen our understanding of art and how to use it to enhance our lives through the practice of making art and giving it away for free.

In this interactive, social art project, we create, and encourage others to create, art galleries and their digital media counterparts in a variety of configurations and sizes, deployed across a spectrum of public and private locations. We invite and organize artists to use the Little Free Art Gallery installations to give away free, original works of art, and to document their gifts in the project's online and printed publications.

We use this free art exchange to create communities and online networks where we engage each other and deepen our understanding of the world as we inspire and help each other to make and share art. Together in person, in digital media, and in print, we discuss art, its "value" and uses, our relationship with original art works and their creators, and related topics.

By making and sharing free art, we seek to liberate our thinking and open more fully to the world and to each other.

"When art is free, so are we."
–Doug Millison, co-founder