A blend of contemporary popular culture, nostalgia, and empowerment will be the main themes of the NFT exhibit.
Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are certificates of ownership
representing digital artwork, music, videos, audio, memorabilia, and
more. They have rapidly gained in popularity over the past year for
their ability to enable everyday artists to create and sell content. In
fact, OpenSea, the world's biggest NFT marketplace, recently surpassed
$1.6 billion in monthly trading volume alone.
Like physical
artwork, NFTs can also be auctioned for charity purposes or donated to
non-profit groups with generous tax deductions. From funding the construction of a school in Uganda, to helping frontline healthcare workers, non-profit NFTs drops can play a decisive role in making a positive societal difference.
In
an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Lisa Slominski and Nick
Dehadray, co-founders of Moon Landing, a new initiative for
neurodiversity in the NFT space, discussed their upcoming NFT auction
supporting contemporary artists with intellectual disabilities and the
non-profit studio they work from. The key theme of the pieces is that of
pop culture and nostalgia, intertwined with moments of struggle and
perseverance from the artists' everyday lives. The collection is called NFToons, which can be previewed now and available for public auction starting in January 2022.
Cointelegraph: Please tell me, who are some of the artists behind your NFT project?
Lisa Slominski:
Sure, so the first project is NFToons, which is eight artists who are
working with Project Onward, which is a non-profit in Chicago that
supports artists with varying intellectual disabilities and social
needs. Out of these eight artists, one of them is this wonderful artist
named Ruby Bradford. And I've curated exhibitions with her before, and
her practice is based a lot around Superman and cats, associating both
of those with caring and belonging. So for NFToons, we really took one
of her iconic paintings of Superman as a cat, and then animated it,
moving it off the screen, and she actually sings the soundtrack to the
.mp4 NFT, where she is doing a cat rendition of the Superman-themed
song. So that is one example.
Another artist is named Louis
Demarco. And actually, I got one of his drawings back there as well
(pointing to an artwork on the mantle behind her). But he makes really
interesting works that are called "Words to live by". He makes a lot of
tech space work based on mantras he tells himself. What he also did is
develop his own screenplay like in a band. So he developed a concept for
a TV show called 'Toasters,' and it's his own mash-up of "Friends" and
"Cheers." So he's created a pilot episode which we will promote on
Twitter and Instagram, so anyone can watch. His NFT is his drawing of
the set of two of the characters' apartments. And he also made his own
soundtrack to the TV show. So that's the audio on that one.
CT:
So, reading the press release. Apparently, a portion of the proceeds
will be given to charity; which organization will that be?
LS: The charity is their studio. All of these artists work
at a day art studio, The Project Onward. Project Onward is a non-profit
501(c) (3) [Legal U.S. federal income tax-exempt non-profit entity]
charity in Chicago that supports these artists with disabilities. So 80%
of the sales will go back into that studio and to the artists. Moon
Landing plans for each project to be a collaboration with a non-profit
studio that supports artists with disability. Where we work with their
artists creating NFTs and the proceeds go to the artists and studios.
Our second project will be with the studio Arts Project Australia,
Melbourne.
CT: So what inspired you guys, in particular, to work with these artists in helping to tell their story?
LS:
Sure, so I've sort of worked in the larger field of neurodiversity
contemporary art for three years. And I used to work solely in
contemporary art, and I worked for an organization here in London, which
is called Museum of Everything, and they look at what a lot of people
refer to as "outsider art," which is a problematic term, but, it often
includes some kind of artists with disabilities, artists that are
self-taught, artists from marginalized positions. Anyway, after coming
out of there and starting to work on my sort of independent project, I
really found I was exposed to some artists through those positions that
had disabilities. I just found the artwork to be absolutely incredible
coming out of these studios.
And I started thinking to myself,
they are just contemporary artists, even though they have disabilities.
They are just young, contemporary artists, so I started incorporating
them into exhibitions that I was curating. I've written some articles
about them for Artsy. But, specifically, these studios, so
internationally, there are probably 30 to 50 different versions of these
non-profit studios that create professional development and creative
environments for artists with varying social needs and disabilities to
develop a creative practice. And I connected with Nick a few years ago
now; he did some promotional animations for some of the exhibitions that
I was curating, and then, yeah. So sort of leaning on that, I realized
with his interest in NFTs and creative diversity and my interest, it
would be a great opportunity to do something interesting and meaningful
in the NFT space.
Nick Dehadray: Yeah, I think
what I saw was really the way the NFT space was supporting self-taught
artists and that it was a really strong community around that, and still
is. So I thought it really fit into this type of work, of neurodiverse
artists teaching themselves and creating art for the enjoyment of
others. So it seems to really make sense that NFTs could be a really
great space for them to sell it, whereas I think in the contemporary art
market, they don't really set these prices that high. So they might get
a better chance from making their work in the NFT space.
CT: More
of a technical question; with Ethereum gas prices being very high, it
can cost hundreds of dollars to mint an NFT. Will you guys be providing
financial support for artists as they go through the auction?
ND: Well,
we are going to go through it as an auction via OpenSea. So the minting
will be done by the people purchasing, and we will be doing it on
Ethereum for this one, but we have also considered other currencies like
Polygon, where there are no gas fees on lightspeed. But at the moment,
Ethereum still has a bigger share of uses. So it seems to make sense to
go with that one at the moment.
LS: Yea, we are working directly with the studios who are handling all that stuff ahead of time.
CT: Would you guys like to include a mission statement about your work?
LS:
Yea, so just a couple of things following up on Nick's point. There are
some parallels, I mean diversity in general, in the contemporary art
sphere is a struggle, and neurodiversity is a new one. And there are
discussions at the moment about, like I went to talk last night, that
was called 'Can We Be Artists?', and it was talking about neurodiverse
artists carving out a perspective space in the art world. So I do think
the NFT space has this opportunity to democratize things and create
direct access from creators to the audience. It has great potential and
can really elevate a lot of artists that may otherwise find access
points into the art world difficult, which I find quite interesting. And
then, you know, we are trying to elevate these artists, elevate these
non-profits. We know that people in the NFT space are asking about
diversity, about neurodiversity. But connecting to them is difficult.
ND:
Yea, this is one of the difficulties we are having. Because there are
big influencers out there, such as gmoney, they are putting out comments
saying we need more diversity in the space. But we are not visible at
the moment because we just started out. But we'll try messaging gmoney,
but he doesn't reply.
LS: So yeah, that's sort
of it really. Obviously, the hope is that NFToons is the initial
project. Then, Moon Landing would continue this initiative. So, we have
two other supportive studios that we already have in mind to do further
projects with the same interest working with the non-profits to support
artists with disabilities, letting them create unique NFTs. And putting
them out for the artists and the non-profits.
ND:
And it's a quite good way of introducing them to [inaudible] that they
might not be able to work with. For example, we were looking at one
artist, Terry Williams from Art Project Australia, who's done these
sculptures of astronauts. But we can 3-D scan those, and with 3-D
scanning, we can turn that into an NFT. And we might not be able to do
that otherwise. So there are really good opportunities to empower
artists to use technology they otherwise wouldn't consider using or have
access to.
Artwork credit reference: Ruby Bradford, Superman Cat, 2021 NFT, .mp4 | Redrawn in Cointelegraph style
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/moon-landing-initiative-brings-neurodiversity-to-nfts-and-supports-art-non-profits
