Dickson Schneider Email & Phone Number

Alameda, Ca, Us

Oakland, Ca

Since 2009 I have been giving away art at the Oakland Art Murmur On the First Friday of every month I set up a card table on the street, tape a sign on it that says "FREE ART" and give the art away that I made in the last month. I estimate that I have made and distributed about 1,500 artworks to the people passing by. Some of them have become collectors of my free art.I recently made a paleta cart so that the free art can be mobile.I started doing this as a class project with my students. Over a period of some months the students became less interested in showing up for the FREE ART table, but it has become the main part of my art practice. More and more I want to create and engage art communities through unofficial channels. I suppose my effort has roots in social practice art. It is also about taking ownership of the structures of the art community.I want to create and engage art communities through unofficial channels. While the entire art world seems to be only interested in status and value, and all artists talk about is money and almost all art advice is about monetizing your art practice, I want to reconsider the whole game. I am starting at a new place where there is no barrier between making and owning art, a place where there are no gatekeepers determing what is shown and who can own. No one started out in art because they wanted to make money - they began because they responded to the poety of art - the purity and difficulty of trying to understand or express something of the human expereince. I am challenging the idea that Art is a business, that money is the entry to Art, and that social exchanges must be predicated on commerce.I took the Art Cart to Art Basel Miami this year (2012). I was connected to the Aqua Art Fair through a local gallery. In Miami I gave away 328 pieces of art to people on the street, both to art lovers there for the fairs and to Haitian street kids who were trying to sell me candy. In Miami, the