Friday, December 20, 2019

Remember these?


About fifteen years ago I started making these little one-quarter scale "tiles" of Map panels. Each one was two inches wide and two-and-a-half inches high. Over the years I made over 9000 of them! I placed them on ledges in cities where I was having a show. Or I placed them around the town where I lived. A few people found them and collected them. I sold sets of them on eBay. I gave them to friends and new acquaintances.

Now I am about to put them back into circulation. And I am going to make a game of them. Here's how it will work: anyone finding two contiguous tiles will win a gift of an original Jerry's Map panel! Yay! I will give tiles away with all online purchases of Map items. I will hide tiles and tell you where to look for them. I will sell them. And I will send a couple, for free, to anyone who sends me an old-fashioned self addressed stamped envelope.

How does that sound? I'm looking to launch this game before the new year.

Good luck!

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Jerry's museum donations

For the past four or five years, since I started advancing into my seventies, I have been searching for safe homes for my monster art project. Never one to play by the prevailing rules, I started by sending groups of twenty contiguous panels (like the ones pictured above) to randomly selected museums throughout the world. The results were, at best,
spotty. The majority of the institutions didn't even acknowledge receipt of the gift.  A couple sent rejection letters but never returned the panels. A noble few of them returned the panels with a nice letter. One accepted the panels outright and thanked me.

I had much better results with the museums with whom I had a prior relationship. Nine of them have now added my work to their permanent collections. I am grateful to them for providing a home for project!

My latest approach is to mail out groups of panels to museum directors along with a cover letter which tells them that the work is a personal gift to them and that they are free to dispose of it as they see fit or to return it to me. I ask only that they tell me what they have decided to do with the gift. We'll see.......

In the meantime I continue to offer panels, copies, postcards, and "instruction cards" on both Etsy and eBay. The sales from that helps defray the cost of materials and the aid of a part-time assistant. Many thanks to those who have helped!