I’m happy to report that with the help of half a dozen dedicated volunteers, the Handmade For Japan East Coast Office has made significant organizational headway today! With 94 artists, galleries, and donors involved and literally thousands of emails back and forth, there has been a mountain of information to sort and upload. Thank god for Google is all I can say! We’ve been burning the candle at both ends, trying to stay focused enough to catch typing errors that lead to such things as “Thank you so much for donating to our benefit suction!” (a is next to s) The bulk of the uploading to eBay is now done, so tomorrow we can double, triple, and cross check all our facts.
On top of numerous posts and mentions online, we’ve had two new articles written about us. One in American Craft Blog and one in the Japan Times. We are grateful to them for keeping awareness about the situation in Japan on people’s radar.
In the past few days, several well-known ceramic and craft galleries including Dai Ichi Arts, Joan B Mirviss Gallery, Lacoste Gallery and TAI Gallery have donated major pieces to us including the Grand Daddy of Studio Pottery, Shoji Hamada . One of my own heroes, Betty Woodman, has given a beautiful print, as has Jeffry Mitchell and Shiela Coppola of Seattle who contributed delicate etchings of peonies printed on silk. There are too many excellent artists to list here, so I just want to say how grateful I am to all of them for being part of this grass roots effort.
Based on the significant donations we’ve received, we have raised our projected target for the auction from $25,000o to $50,000! Please help us reach this goal by spreading the word!
Thank you to Allison Leach, Jen Jeglinski, Cristin O’Neal, Lynn Bondar, Leslie Melvin, Erin Enouen, and Robin Whitlock for coming to our aid!