- When I was in art school,
I really hated just making art for no purpose.
We now have books that are 11 or 12 years old.
It's become almost like a time capsule
for people all over the world
and we have kids who were kids when they did it
and now have come back, like,
in their 20s to visit their book.
I'm much more about this idea of community
creation rather than individual artists.
It's a lot more fun to know there's people
all over the world working on the same thing as you,
whether it's an outlet to talk about something
or just a way to practice their art making.
Everyone obviously has something interesting to say.
We all share it online all the time,
this is just your story in their hands.
I'm the founder of The Sketchbook Project
and Brooklyn Art Library, where we have
45,000 sketchbooks from over 100 different countries.
It started as sort of just a way
to get our community involved
in a little gallery space set we had set up.
And we started to just put these calls out
and it was very sort of, like,
we have different objects we can send,
like a disposable camera or a sketchbook or a canvas.
And people started to email us from all
over wanting to be a part of the project.
And The Sketchbook Project was one
of many of these things that we did,
but it was the one that we always sort of went back to
and it kept growing.
Anyone can submit by going to our website,
brooklynartlibrary.com,
and they can order a book.
They're five by seven.
You can draw in it,
you can sketch in it.
Anything you could possibly wanna do,
you can rebind it and you can make it your own.
It has to be thinner than an inch.
And then you'll mail it back to us.
In that process,
you'll catalog your book with all of your keywords,
so whether that's the topic that you did
or the mediums you used
or the location that you live
or you can put in a whole entire bio about yourself
and all of that becomes searchable in our library system.
So when the book returns back,
you'll be able,
or viewers will be able to come and search for your book
or search for topics they're interested in
and hopefully your book is one of them.
And then it lives permanently in our space.
Here's looks like a kids book.
Oh, it's a whole middle school
in California that all did monsters.
This book,
I mean, I'm biased on this book because it's my wife,
but I think it's a great example
of a complete different one.
So she made this felted rat inside
and it was the encyclopedia of New York City rats
and then each of it's little clothing
is the brunch rat,
and he's got cheese on his plate, obviously.
The freelancer rat.
This is his, when he goes down to Florida for the winter.
He's got his little bikini.
(laughs)
A lot of people take this sort of to a new level.
Most of them I think are kinda full art projects.
Though there are obviously people
who just use it to sketch
and that's awesome.
I think it's really cool too
when people decide to make it a whole
project from beginning to end.
There's a lot people use it also as a starting point
for their own personal projects.
They'll make the book and then they'll use it to grow.
We've had people who are in their 60s
who have never made art before
and then this was their first time
and then now they're going back to school for art
'cause they were inspired by this
or we have professional artists
that use this as their one fun project
a year that is not work related.
You could pull a book off the shelf
and no matter what you pull,
it's completely different from the one next to it,
and even though they're the same theme
or might've used the same approach,
everyone is so individual
and I think that's so interesting.
And then it blends together into one giant piece.