We have turned off the lights in our booth out of respect for the over 500,000 mothers who have unjustly and prematurely lost their children to the opioid epidemic.
Together with our artists, and as the gallery that founded the Spoon Movement, we have agreed to put human lives before sales at this highly expensive venue to raise awareness.
At exactly 7pm during Saturday’s show, we’ve lobbied the art fair operators to observe a minute of silence to honor the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to this epidemic.
As the Spoon Movement continues to push for the right type of accountability of holding accountable the “architects” of this epidemic in the civil suits filed by states and the Federal Government, we continue to create awareness with the arts as a medium.
We use our founder’s gallery as a platform to influence change. ln doing so, we launched an activist installation at Art Wynwood 2019 art on February 14th during the Preview and to go on until the end of the fair. We also lobbied senior management to give a minute of silence to the mothers who lost their kids on Saturday, February 16th at 7pm. The curated project included turning off the lights and pasting 500,000+ on every (turned-off) lightbulb in the booth as a reminder of the number of people that have died due to these drugs. It also included a wall text explaining why this important and questioning museums and educational institutions who take what we consider “blood money”.
Unfortunately, it is with great sadness that the best well run and most successful, middle-tier art fair in America, Art Miami, LLC through its fair Art Wynwood, profoundly refused to allow us to exhibit this important opioid epidemic awareness activist art installation on behalf of the 500,000 mothers who lost their children due to this epidemic.
