With so many people impacted by the spread of Covid-19, former East student Tanya Qu decided to take action and help the community by creating an online art auction with her school’s art club, the North Carolina School of Science and Math Art Club. The art auction raised over $7,000 for charity, with a bid on every donated piece. (https://ncssmart.wixsite.com/auction)
Qu is currently the junior executive board member of the club and will be the president next school year. When school closed for the year, she found herself with a lot of time and empathy and decided to create the auction to help those in need in her community.
“I was chilling [at home] one day, like one week after they canceled school for us, and I was thinking that I am in a very privileged position to be just chilling,” Qu said. “My family is financially stable enough to not have problems during this time and none of my friends and family are immediately impacted by it, so in this position of privilege, it is the least I can do to give back however I can.”
The auction took donations from both high school and local artists in mediums ranging from paintings to embroidery, and many of the donations came from artists at East. After a week of bidding on the art auction website, $5,000 had been raised on about 150 pieces, exceeding Qu’s expectations.
“More people participated than we had hoped,” Qu said. “We thought it would mainly be NCSSM students, but after reaching out to other schools, like East, a lot of artists are really interested in helping. On the other end of it, I didn’t think people would want to spend money on high school artists, but I’ve realized that even if a family is struggling with coronavirus, they still want to help the community. I underestimated how good people genuinely can be.”
The art auction is not only benefiting charity, but also students and local artists by giving their work exposure. On the art auction website, each piece is listed with the name of the artist and an optional description of their work, and for some a link to their personal websites.
“We try to post shoutouts for artists every day to show off pieces of work on all the social media accounts,” Qu said. “NCSSM uses Facebook for alumni and parents, so we’re doing a slideshow every day of art, and though we’re not paying the artists because it is charity based, we’re trying to give them some credit.”
With many events and programs that are important for local artists closed in Chapel Hill, now is a good time to commission local artists for art, or ask your parents to. The artist directory on the Orange County Arts Commission website and the art auction website both provide names and contact information of local artists. Other ways to help artists include enrolling at the ArtCenter’s new online classes, sharing the work of local artists on social media and donating to the Orange County Arts Support Fund to support artists who are out of work. East Art Team co-president Meta Zhou agrees that commissions are very important during this time of crisis.
“Right now I think people could support artists by buying artwork, if they want to,” Zhou said. “I mean with public events shut down I feel like they’d have to rely more heavily on commission pieces.”
All of the proceeds from the art auction will benefit the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina to provide support for those in need.
Photo courtesy of Tanya Qu
