Artists for Charity: Transforming Barriers
June 6, 2020 - June 13, 2020
Artspace Warehouse is committed to helping our community with Artists for Charity: Transforming Barriers, a charity event dedicated to establishing peace within our community while allowing all voices to be heard. The featured artists involved with the project have freely volunteered their time and efforts to create art on the wood panels outside of Artspace Warehouse. The painted wood panels will be sold to support organizations chosen by each artist. Artspace Warehouse is underwriting all costs for the artworks. 100% of proceeds will be donated to each of the nonprofits. The benefit features artworks by Danny Brown, Amber Goldhammer, Robert Lebsack, Pete Kasprzak, Kodjovi Olympio, and Sarah Svetlana.
Danny Brown became fluent in the use of color blocking and translating rougher imagery into something vibrant through the subculture of street art. Brown’s art coalesces youth culture, art history, fashion, and American consumerism and melds them all to create his unique style. The proceeds of his sold artwork will go to the nonprofit organization Youth Justice LA which works to build a youth, family, and incarcerated people’s movement to end mass incarceration, deportation, and police violence.
Amber Goldhammer is best known for creating vibrant abstract paintings with a street art edge. She originally started painting with pigments, powders, and waxes and went on to experimenting with mixed mediums and processes to keep evolving her artworks. Connecting people through public art is one way she believes her street murals can impact lives, as it is impossible to view her work and not feel a sense of joy and love. Goldhammer’s proceeds will be donated to the organization My Friend’s Place, which works toward helping the homeless youth move toward wellness, stability, and self-sufficiency.
Robert Lebsack typically creates artworks using mixed media with ink, acrylic, and charcoal on archival copies of newspaper or sheet music. His street art tends to focus on social and cultural issues using bits and pieces of headlines, articles, and ads as the background. The artwork that he has created for Transforming Barriers features a woman speaking through a megaphone, allowing her voice to be heard. The proceeds of Lebsack’s artwork will go to Innocence Project, dedicated to supporting the fight for justice against police brutality.
Pete Kasprzak’s passion for city life is expressed in his dynamic urban artworks. Kasprzak’s artworks express energy and life with animated brush strokes. He adds dynamic movement and texture with oil and acrylic paint on his mixed-media cityscape artworks. Kasprzak’s artwork proceeds will go to Homeboy Industries, an organization that provides hope and support to those individuals who were formerly gang-involved or previously incarcerated.
Sarah Svetlana is a Los Angeles based artist who, as a painter, explores the fragmentation of the subject in an ongoing search for home. An agency model, turned art model, Svetlana used her body as the first medium in her initial search for identity and self-expression—her upbringing in the irreconcilable cultures of Soviet Belarus and Immigrant America, has drawn and painted roadmaps between two worlds. The proceeds of her artwork will go to The Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth.
Ostensive qualities of balance and honesty break though energetic compositions in Kodjovi Olympio’s artworks. Born and raised in Togo, West Africa, Olympio moved to Paris, and then the United States where his work won him the accolade of “Top 10 Artist at Art Basel Miami” in 2018. Olympio’s work is honest and palpable: exposed, raw, and direct. Olympio’s proceeds will go to Chrysalis, a nonprofit organization that works toward providing jobs for the homeless. Chrysalis is currently raising money for their Covid-19 Relief Fund.
