Brownstones to Red Dirt Postcard Art Benefit

The generosity of the animation community never ceases to amaze me. Inbetween demanding workloads and crushing deadlines, we still manage to find the time to pull together and help with bigger causes. Just in the past few months, we’ve had the Help the Hodges campaign and Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich’s benefit for Haiti auction.

Now, two employees at Blue Sky Studios, David LaMattina and Chad Walker, will be holding an online postcard art auction between March 6-13. Over one hundred and fifty artists, including many Blue Skyers, have donated work. The proceeds from the “Brownstones To Red Dirt” benefit will go towards building a school for orphans in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to create a school library for kids in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, which incidentally happens to be my own neighborhood. The use of wooden postcards and the choice to support these two projects is not random; the benefit is tied in to a feature-length documentary that LaMattina and Walker made a couple years ago about “a pen pal program between a group of at-risk sixth graders living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and orphans from the war living in Freetown, Sierra Leone.” The documentary website is BrownstonestoRedDirt.com.

There are a surprising number of beautiful and delightful pieces created for the auction. A preview of all the pieces can be found on the Brownstones to Red Dirt auction website. The postcards I’ve included in this post are, from top to bottom, by Sandeep Menon, Patricia Horing, Dice Tsutsumi and Nicole Gustafsson.