Every year for the past six years, AIDS CT has held Art for AIDS, a benefit art-grab event at the ArtSpace Gallery in Hartford. All ticket-holders are admitted to the ArtSpace gallery, given free food and drinks and then allowed to take home one of the 12×12-inch pieces of art on the wall.
This year, like every year, a member of the Richard B. Fried family gets to choose a piece of art first. After all, Joel Fried, Richard B. Fried’s brother, started the fund that benefits from the event.
“We have one $500 ticket. Joel Fried gets it,” said Wendy Graveley of Hebron, organizer of Art for AIDS. “After that, we have 10 $200 tickets. They go next. Then 20 $100 tickets. They go next. The rest are $50 tickets, and they go in a kind of crazy lottery.”
About 100 Hartford-area artists have contributed a total of about 200 canvases to this year’s event, which will be held on Saturday, June 6, starting at 7 p.m. at the 555 Asylum Ave. artspace. All ticketholders can meet the artists who created their canvases.
Graveley said 10,000 Connecticut residents are living with AIDS. Eighty percent of the event’s proceeds go directly to AIDS CT, which helps people with AIDS with housing, advocacy, prevention and support services. The remaining 20 percent goes to the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving’s Richard B. Fried Fund.
All the food is donated, by local restaurants including Bear’s, Amor Vegan, Arugula, Blue Plate Kitchen, Capitol View Deli, Fire & Spice, Joey Garlic’s, the Uncommon Cupcake, Starbucks and Harvest Wine & Spirits.
Each artist who donates a canvas for give-away gets space in the gallery to sell other artworks, with a percentage of the profits going to AIDS CT.
Among the artists participating are Gwyneth Amy, Meredith Arcari, Linn Bae, John Murphy, Louisa Barton-Duguay, Matthew Best, Leonard Bullaro, Clinton Deckert, Joseph Gorneault, Barbara Hocker, Amy LaBossiere, Tao LaBossiere, Joe Nicorici, Sarah Paolucci, Susan Tait Porcaro, Maurice Robertson, Andre Rochester, Nina Salazar, Edward Santos, and Nicola Sinclair.
To buy tickets, visit aids-ct.org.
