Oliver was like "Ryan, come sit with us!" So I did. Here was with Laurie as well.
"Success" is a red ladder with little people climbing on it, while "Mixed Messages" is a collage of graffiti done by our students and Lorette together.
The primary colored dim-sum baskets and a collage of color papers were great hits at the auction.
All these works had taken us months to finish!
"Diner" was purchased for 4,000 dollars even before the exhibition was started! It is one of my favorite pieces too.
From zero to hero is the best way to describe this wonderful experience! I had the opportunity to take part in this art exhibition a month or so after I joined the Nesbitt Centre. In the beginning, I knew nothing about it, and I didn´t know what it was for and what it was all about. I became more involved in the last couple of months, when I had to run sessions by myself and finishing off all the artworks that we were going to display. It was not an easy task at all, but thankfully everybody was very helpful and we pulled it off very nicely!
So on last Thursday, we hanged everything up in the exhibition area. The whole concept was about the neighborhood, so we used scaffolding as the background to hang all the artworks. We were so thrilled to see it there as it was amazingly effective against all the colorful artworks! It was a long long day, but well worth the effort as it turned out really impressive. Ruth and I worked really hard to put everything together, while Lorette was helping with the whole setting. It was purely teamwork. Ruth and I had a major laugh about a joke about the "holes"! LOL
As the show started at 7pm, all the students dressed in our project tee and all stuff tried to get everything ready. Some of them did survey with the guests while others took pictures, helping with the handprint project or handing out our artwork catalogue. I was put to show a journalist from Timeout Magazine, Sherry, around and explained to her what this project was really about. I had to answer some pretty tough questions but I think I did pull it off! Yay! She really enjoyed the exhibition and found it very impressive. I also chatted with Winnie Yip from the Art Development Council which provided funding for making this project possible. She was overly impressed with it, and told me that she is more than happy to work with us again! Another Yay! Somehow while I was so busy doing all these showing around, the hall was simply packed with people! It was so crazily amazing! My sister Teresa, my brother-in-law and Maggie all came and supported us, which was very nice.
At 8:30pm, the highlight of the evening finally arrived .... our Auction done by Christie´s. They were nice enough to help us do this auction for free, so was Sharon Kwok who was the emcee of the evening. In the past few weeks we were all not sure how the auction would turn out, and we said we would be happy to see if the artworks were sold for a couple hundred. But it was over our expectation. The first piece went from 500, to 1000, to 1500 to 2000......it was just incredible! I was sweating the whole time! Of course, we know that these are great artworks, but we never expected people actually loved them. I was jumping up and down the whole time! At the end, we raised 33,000 dollars for the 12 pieces we auctioned! How incredible was that! The team was overjoyed, and it has made our students so proud and happy. I am so proud of them, and it has shown that people with special needs not only have talents but also they can make money! All the proceeds would go to four local charitable organizations, which means that our students made money for charity, how cool is that!
It had been a really really wonderful experience, something that I would never forget in my life.
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