Art To Be Seen began in a small Virginia town, with a kid who found that art was the one place he didn't have to hide.

The problem

Across the country, LGBTQ+ artists are making work that tells the truth about their lives. Many of them live in small towns where nobody is paying attention. They buy their own materials, hang a show in a library meeting room, and take it down a week later. Nobody pays them and nobody writes it down.

A few years on, the painting is in a closet and the story is gone. That isn't a talent problem. It's a question of who gets funded and who gets remembered.

What we do

Art To Be Seen commissions LGBTQ+ artists, one in every state, to make original work about LGBTQ+ life in America. The artist is paid up front and keeps control of what they make.

The work opens where they live, with the artist in the room, then travels to Washington and joins a permanent public collection that gets documented and preserved. A researcher thirty years from now can still find the painting and read the artist's own account of making it.

Where we are

Volume One commissions twelve artists from twelve states, beginning in 2027, with priority on smaller communities. Artist fees come to $30,000.

The rest is the part nobody photographs. Crating a painting so it ships without cracking. Keeping a collection space climate controlled. Paying the people who write the agreements and stand in the room on opening night. An artist in a town of four thousand shouldn't have to be her own shipper and archivist.

What your gift does

Your gift is the first money in, and first money in is what lets an artist start.

Twenty-five dollars is a share of an artist's fee. A hundred people at that level is one artist paid to make one piece that didn't exist before anyone gave. Twenty-five a month is three hundred over the year, which is a real part of one commission.

Somebody gets to work, and the work goes into a collection instead of a closet.

What you get

Your name goes in the founding record of the collection, as one of the people who started it. You'll get studio updates while each piece is being made, so you see the work before the public does, and an invitation to the first Washington exhibition.

If you've ever been the only one in the room, you know what this is for. If you haven't, fund the room where somebody else doesn't have to be alone.