The People's Gallery
One hundred thousand pieces of art, made by strangers on a bus
The brief
Sharpie Creative Markers launched on a claim: that everyone is creative. Claims are cheap. The tour existed to make the claim happen to people rather than at them, and the gallery is what the tour produced.
The idea
A sampled marker is not a freebie, it is a dare. Hand one to somebody who has just told you they cannot draw, and the interesting thing is not whether they can. It is that they do. Every mark made on the bus was evidence, and evidence accumulates.
The work
Forty thousand miles of road and five hundred thousand markers placed directly into people's hands produced more than one hundred thousand original pieces of art, all of it made on the bus by people who walked up. We built the People's Gallery to hold it: ninety-two selected works, filterable by the stop they were made at, credited to the place rather than the brand.
The route
Nine stops carry work in the gallery. Main Street Art Festival in Fort Worth, Governors Ball in New York, Art Battle Chicago, the Ann Arbor Art Festival, Comic-Con International in San Diego, Art Battle Los Angeles, ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Krewe of Boo in New Orleans, and Art Basel in Miami. Thirteen festivals were on the route in total, opening at SXSW and closing at Art Basel.
Why it works
Eighty-one thousand people came off that bus as Sharpie advocates, having done an active product demo and shared a selfie of the thing they made. A gallery of their work is the only proof the campaign needed, and it is proof the brand does not have to narrate.
If your brand has a piece of work in it that has not been made yet, we would like to hear about it.
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