Works donated by greater than 100 artists—together with Jeff Koons, Amy Sherald, Jenny Holzer, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker and George Apartment—are being offered to boost funds for the US presidential marketing campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and her operating mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The sale, dubbed Artists for Kamala, has been organised by the Harris Victory Fund, with greater than 100 works out there for direct buy whereas 41 items are being supplied by way of a web based public sale on Artsy.
Whereas the gross sales embody some apolitical works or uncommon items by late artists (together with Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Value, Carmen Herrera and Richard Serra), others are overtly political—or ambiguously patriotic. The sale portion contains a poster print by Jonathan Horowitz, Harris ’24 (2024), that features Harris’s portrait on the finish of a timeline of all of the earlier and present US presidents. And Maynard Monrow’s mixed-media textual content work Untitled/Democracy (2022) consists of the phrase “Democracy Come Hell or Excessive Water” spelled out on a pink assist.
Jeff Koons, American Flagpole (Gazing Balls), 2024, est $300,000 © Jeff Koons
Koons’s contribution to the public sale, in the meantime, is a brand new work in his Gazing Balls sequence that includes pink, white and blue reflective balls on the foot of a flagpole flying the US flag (as of this writing, the main bid is $150,000). Sheila Hicks has contributed a brand new assemblage of linen threads to the public sale, titled Irreversibly Evolving Democracy, estimated at $27,000. One other piece on supply within the public sale, Josh Smith’s vibrant obvious tribute to the late film-maker Jonathan Demme (Demme, 2017), is being supplied not by the artist however from the private assortment of one other Hollywood determine, the actor and artwork collector Leonardo DiCaprio.
Apartment’s providing, the work on paper Girls Are Lovely (2024), is titled after the photographer Garry Winogrand’s sequence of the identical identify, the artist mentioned in a press release. “I hope that Kamala Harris will restore the religion that we put in ladies in our society,” he added. “I consider the Harris-Walz crew will look out for each considered one of us and that the sunshine of their imaginative and prescient will ship us from the darkness that we now not want to dwell in.”
George Apartment, Girls Are Lovely, 2024, est $150,000 © George Apartment
Gross sales from the Artsy public sale portion of the Artists for Kamala fundraiser (which runs by way of 8 October) are anticipated to convey greater than $1m, whereas the 117 items out there for direct buy have a cumulative worth of greater than $2.4m.
“Artwork has all the time been a robust solution to specific one’s imaginative and prescient and beliefs and to mobilise individuals into motion,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the supervisor of the Harris for President marketing campaign, mentioned in a press release. “The artworks within the Artists for Kamala assortment accomplish that brilliantly. We’re so grateful to the artwork neighborhood for utilizing their creativity, trusted voices, and highly effective work to assist Vice President Harris’s marketing campaign to show the web page on hate and division, and transfer our nation ahead.”
Jenny Holzer, Choice from Truisms: There are too few…, 2023, est $200,000 © Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
No comparable “Artists for Trump” fundraiser seems to exist in assist of the previous president Donald Trump and his operating mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Nonetheless, their marketing campaign’s official retailer features a huge vary of merchandise, together with a number of with a model of Trump’s mugshot within the model of Shepard Fairey’s well-known Hope poster design for Barack Obama’s 2008 marketing campaign. (Fairey, in the meantime, has contributed a number of works to the Artists for Kamala fundraiser.)
Many influential artists, collectors and philanthropists—together with a number of concerned within the Artists for Kamala marketing campaign—have very prominently pledged their assist for Harris and Walz. Lots of the extra right-leaning collectors and humanities philanthropists within the US put important funds in direction of supporting Trump’s opponents within the Republican primaries earlier this yr.
In 2020, David Zwirner hosted an identical fundraising sale of artwork by greater than 100 artists in assist of Joe Biden’s marketing campaign by way of the gallery’s on-line gross sales channel, Platform.
