Shepard Fairey

ARTWALK NY FEATURES SHEPARD FAIREY BENEFIT PRINT

ARTWALK NY, the annual benefit for the Coalition for the Homeless, takes place tomorrow night, Nov. 15, 2011, with a glittering lineup of stars and sponsors, including the great Alec Baldwin as well as Richard Gere and Carey Lowell. The event takes place at Skylight Studio on Hudson Street in SoHo, and includes cocktails as well as a silent auction with donated artworks by everyone from Donald Baechler and Christo to Lane Twitchell and Johannes VanDerBeek.

The live auction includes works by Fairey, Wade Guyton, Invader, Kim McCarty, Ed Ruscha and others, and is conducted by the bewitching Aileen Agopian of Sotheby's. The event is always jammed -- but tickets start at $250.

This year the Coalition has introduced the "Artist as Activist" print project, underwritten by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and featuring a custom-made print edition by Shepard Fairey. Titled The Future Is Unwritten -- a phrase borrowed from Clash guitarist Joe Strummer -- the work features an image of a flower growing from a piece of barbed wire, "a visual metaphor for hope in the unwritten future," as the artist describes it.

The Future Is Unwritten is being offered exclusively through Artnet Auctions in a "buy it now" sale that began on Friday, Nov. 11, and continues to Dec. 9, 2011. Prices for prints in the edition of 100 increase incrementally, starting at $1,250 for the first ten prints and ending at $2,500 for the last 25. As of this writing, approximately 30 prints have sold, and they are now at the $1,950 level.

All proceeds go to the Coalition for the Homeless, and proceeds should total almost $135,000 when the edition is entirely sold -- which seems likely to happen sooner than later.

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