Selling art, feeding the hungry
Miriam Stern offers work online; proceeds go to charities
Most of us know the cultural tropes about the tormented artist. The writer who stalks around his typewriter, plunking out two or three words (it’s always a man, never a woman, and the machine is never a computer, or a word processor, or even a Selectric but always a from-the-dawn-of-time typewriter), then noisily tearing the sheet out of the contraption, crumpling it up, and throwing it into a corner, presumably to be picked up by the invisible maid or long-suffering wife.
Or there’s the painter who slashes a few blasts of color onto a canvas, staggers away from it, and throws more color at it from a different direction, if he’s not slashing his ear off instead.
While an artist’s block can be a real and seriously debilitating thing, not all artists suffer from it.
There are also artists who make art day after day, week after week, year after year. Some artists also are skilled marketers who are interested in taking time away from making art to sell their work. (And also of course to make the money they need to support themselves as they go back to the studio.) Some are lucky enough to have connected with art dealers who can do that work for them.
But if you’re the kind of artist who loves creating but isn’t so interested in selling, and if you’re constantly looking around and seeing things and experimenting with media, you can end up with a lot of canvases that you have no choice but to stack in your house.
Miriam Stern of Teaneck knows about that problem. She’s a prolific visual artist, and she makes many more pieces of art than she can possibly hang in her own house. And she has a strong sense of an obligation to the community that demands that she help people less fortunate than she is.
So, she’s come up with an ingenious idea, which she’s already done twice. But “I haven’t done it since 2022,” Ms. Stern said. “It’s been almost three years. I think that it’s time.”
All the pieces that Ms. Stern sells in the project go for $200 each — much less than they would fetch in a more traditional market — and all the proceeds go to four charities that feed the hungry, both in Israel and here at home.
The art comes unframed — buyers can use her framer, who charges his own fee and works for profit, or they can bring it home as it is — and buyers either can pick it up or have it shipped to their homes, at their expense.
But all the money she’ll raise for the prints that she’s selling will go to four charities. Leket Israel is in Israel; Mazon/A Jewish Response to Hunger is a U.S. national organization; Tomchei Shabbos of Bergen County is county-wide; and the Center for Food Action is in Englewood. All but the Center for Food Action are Jewish charities; the Englewood-based group provides food to anyone local who needs it.
“I’m doing this now because there is such a need for all kinds of charity,” Ms. Stern said. “And you can’t live without food. That’s why I chose charities that provide food.
“In the past, I’ve been able to raise thousands of dollars. I hope to be able to do it again.”
The works she’s selling this time are all prints. Most of them “start out as some part of a photograph that I’ve taken,” she said. “It can be of an interesting place that I’ve seen, interesting architecture, artwork that I’ve seen in a museum.
“When I take the pictures, I don’t think about what they might become. I just photograph things that interest me, the shape or color or design. And then when I come home, I work on the computer. The first part of these prints are done on the computer or my iPad, using Photoshop.
“So I take bits and pieces from the various photographs. Let’s say I’ve chosen a certain artist. I might take a little corner from one painting and another corner from another painting. Sometimes I might mix the artists. And I begin to create a new piece of art, using those bits from other artists.”
By the time she’s finished, she said, the artists whose works she’s photographed are unlikely to be able to see their own work in hers. Years ago, she said, she took many photographs of sculptures by an artist whose work she loved, and based a series of her own on it. “Then I went back and showed it to him, and he really loved it,” she said. “He was really very pleased.
“Usually, the title reflects the place where I took the original photograph, or the artist whose work it is,” she added.
“When I am satisfied with what I’ve done on the computer, I will print it out. I have a very large printer in my studio upstairs that uses 30 by 22 paper. I usually use half sheets, 15 by 22. I print it out on special white art paper.
“Then I take it downstairs to what I call my wet studio — the upstairs one is the clean studio — and I do a monoprint on top of it.”
You can print out many copies of the work she does on the computer, Ms. Stern said, but the monoprint on top of it makes each piece one of a kind.
“You have control on the computer,” she said. “When you print, you have less control. That’s what I love. There is an element of chance. Of serendipity. Sometimes the print doesn’t come out the way I want it to.
“I don’t throw out those prints, the ones that I don’t like. I keep them, and at some point, I usually use them in collages.” She’s particularly likely to make collages when she travels, Ms. Stern said, because she can’t bring her equipment with her, but she can bring pieces of paper.
“I’m offering one-of-a-kind, signed original monoprints,” she said. “Most of them are abstract.” Their names might reflect the artist whose work inspired her — “I did one with the work of the artist Frank Stella, and I titled my piece ‘Stella.’ Or if it’s something I saw in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, the title of the piece would include Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.”
Ms. Stern’s work will be online from June 15 to June 22. It’s at www.miriamstern.net/Art-to-Feed-the-Hungry.
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