We welcome back Cash For Your Warhol with their latest edition You Can’t Take It With You. Take a behind the scenes look with CFYW to see process shots of their latest hand-pulled screen prints created in Somerville, Massachusetts. Their latest tagline ran side by side the obituaries in a rural Maine newspaper, check out more and grab the latest from Cash For Your Warhol on November 11th at 12pm EST.
“At its core, Cash For Your Warhol is a performance piece on art as a commodity. It is presented in a number of ways, stretching its “branding” the way any other business might: signage, billboards, social media, etc. Earlier this year we introduced two new prints via 1xRUN that embrace the environment in which our yard signs have been installed for the past six years. With this new print, we jump to a new medium that is as ambiguous as the others: print newspapers.
Rural Maine is littered with free, low-circulation newspapers focused on local news: calendars of events, sports, churches, sudoku, school schedules, classifieds. One we are particularly familiar with is the Town Line, published in South China, Maine. They print a regular ad space called “Business Card Bulletin Board,” and includes small ads from plumbers, carpenters, small engine repairmen, veterinarians, and more.
This past summer we decided to run an ad for 10 weeks and see what would happen. The answer is: not much. The newspaper quietly cashed our (tiny) payment for the space without asking what our business was about. Nor did we get any calls from the area, that we know of, in part due to its low circulation. We also didn’t know what we would do with this project; as with other media we have explored, we put it out there first and figured it out later.
What we noticed was the ad ran each week on page 5, which always faced the obituaries page. As a result we began to take a closer look at the departed. For ten weeks CFYW and the obituaries were united, temporarily. So we decided to merge the two in this print. One of the layers is an abstract portrait take from one of the obituaries: a 93-year-old former nurse who enjoyed fishing and hunting until late in life. Another layer rolls out a new tag line for CFYW, while another shows pages 4 and 5 from an issue of the Town Line.
While the concept and design are ours, the printing was done in collaboration with James Weinberg of Weinberg Design, also of Somerville, with whom we worked on the previous two prints we did with 1xRUN.
In addition, we’ll be opening our flagship Cash For Your Warhol location in 2016!” – Cash For You Warhol
-1xRUN