JACQI BROWN

THE DOPE ART DEALER

Pimp My Kart 07

Jacqi Brown will be HOMELESS this Basel season

to document two days of life on the streets.

She will be accompanied only by Phluffy Danger,

her doberman, and a few bottles of water.

ALL FUNDS RAISED WILL GO TO HELP RESCUE

PETS LIVING WITH HOMELESS PEOPLE

Jacqi Brown- The Dope Art Dealer

Johnston: owner of now theoretical Faktura Gallery

thedopeartdealer@gmail.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- Performance Dec 7-9 Location: Wynwood to Convention Center

Pimp My Kart lives on this year, shedding the comfort of indoor art events to explore a more immediate existence among Miami’s forgotten: the homeless. PMK has always been about how creativity is often most inspiring when sprouting from what one DOES NOT have. When life has left you with nothing, everyday survival requires a type of honest creativity more inspiring than famous art pieces in museums.

Johnston, as Jacqi Brown the Dope Art Dealer, is performing this task of Pimp My Kart alone this year… And by alone, I mean ALONE. Brown is beginning her journey on Friday night. She will choose one local art event as her starting point and from 7pm Friday night she will be homeless, accepting no help except from strangers, until Sunday. Throughout her journey, she will promote the project to raise awareness, sell dope art for survival, and accept donations. She will walk until she arrives at the Convention Center.

The donations this year help toward a new project; Brown is focusing her energy this year on helping the dogs of homeless people. Aided by Faktura Projekts, a non-profit street dog rescue, PMK 07 is all about helping homeless people care for the dogs that are their only family. Phluffy Danger, Faktura rescue Doberman will be accompanying Brown as her body guard, and no promises are being made that any stray dogs in need won’t join the pack before the end of the night J

Johnston’s performance (as Brown) will document her journey through Wynwood, a neighborhood that had cheap rent to lure in artists, to ultimately make a previously working class neighborhood into a meca for ostentatious investors. The artists are displaced as quickly as the poor. Johnston will make visual the feeling many young artists have: the disillusion, the displacement, the struggle, the overlooked, and the forgotten. As always, special focus will be on the artistic side of survival and the beauty of humans and canines living together on the streets. [Documented in digital voice recordings, photos, and video].

PIMP MY KART 2007: Statement

For PMK 07 I would like to stress that this is a projekt more resolutely located on the fringes of the norm than any other art projekt during Art Basel Miami Beach. There is a rift between contemporary artistic motivations. Large art fairs proclaim an air of authoritative reign over the public perception of the potentiality of art and its monetary increase. For as long as there has been visual communication there have been the questions: is art for communication? for the "people"? for education of the illiterate? is it to serve as the philistine act of the rich to lend it for the viewership of the less endowed? or is art to serve as trophies for the wealthy elite who can physically possess it?

Pimp My Kart has always raised questions of wealth and class in relation to contemporary art, asking the selective group of world level art aesthetes to keep an eye on concepts beyond the pristine autonomous white walls of galleries and convention centers.

This year, PMK will hold true to the century old call to artists to illustrate concepts to those unable to learn from the traditional methods of cultural enlightenment. This year the tables are turned; Johnston (poor artist) will illustrate the life of an artist struggling in Miami. For the art connoisseurs who seem illiterate to the plights of the everyday, here are some things to think about: the rampant poverty in Miami, the use of poor neighborhoods by large art fairs who take the space because of cheap rent but ignore the lives of the people surrounding the exteriors, the reality and cruelty of a life of sacrifice many artists must endure in order for just one hope of a glimpse of the global magnifying lens of Basel, the strife of production rarely revealed in the final piece, the displacement of artists due to developers and raised rent in affordable studio locations.

The poor are rarely blind to the social demands of the wealthy. Yet, do the wealthy see the needs of their fellow humans so clearly? Why then is the festival of ART, the purest form of visual communication, not harnessed for its potential to reveal at least some of these issues to those less inclined to the experience.

PMK 07 aims to help us all see what only art may let us visualize.

Last updated: Nov 28 2007

a.k.a. Jacquelyn Jackson Johnston