Saturday, June 21st 2025 5-8pm
Brooklyn Grain 1166 Manhattan Ave. Brooklyn NY (Greenpoint)
This is the 12th consecutive edition I’ve produced of the annual FOD project (the first edition was released in ’97 in zine form, and then passed along to me by friend and founder @miltjuan in 2012). My feelings about the project and how I produce it shift and evolve each year. Initially, it was a small group of 20-30 friends, simply drawing. Then with the passing of my second parent (first passed over a decade before), the concepts of loss and mourning, and how to talk about and process it all, weighed very heavily on me…it still does. I opened up the project to anyone that might want to participate that found out about it via word of mouth- friends/strangers, 6 year-olds/60 year-olds, professional artists/accountants and hairstylists…then eventually required all participants to include accompanying writing. And with time, the project has grown to the max of 200 participating artists spanning the globe (US, Asia, Australia, Europe), and selected subjects have grown beyond the realm of typical “celebrity” and have become a stronger zeitgeistian-marker, where pop-cultural icons and unjustly murdered innocents depart this mortal coil together, and toxic creeps are sent off without easy dismissal nor necessarily any forgiveness.
Bringing people together to do something regardless of CV; encouraging conversations about tough subjects to lift taboos; prompting everyone to spend some time thinking about someone else, and perhaps even learning something new; and prolonging lives in walking-billboard-form beyond funeral dates (at least as long as ink holds up against years of laundromats)…have all been motivating factors for me. But these last two years… so much death. So much fucking death. The project’s forest/trees have been very hazy to say the least.