WANTED: GOOD HOME FOR 5,500 DOG PAINTINGS
COUPLE WANTS TO CREATE MUSEUM OF COMPASSION FOR 5,500 PAINTINGS OF EUTHANIZED DOGS
In a nondescript warehouse/ studio space off Santa Fe’s Siler Road, thousands of portraits of euthanized dogs are stored, including a group of giant 8-footby-8-foot pictures that cover walls from top to bottom.
Mark Barone, who painted the dogs over four years, and Marina Dervan want a museum to show off the massive collection — 5,500 dog pictures — to “wake up” people about the loss of dogs that end up in shelters, to cultivate compassion, and generate money for dog rescue operations and no-kill shelters.
And they want someone to provide the museum for them.
Dervan said the couple is hoping for a philanthropist “who would come in and say, ‘Hey, I get the vision. I want to be part of this,’ and make this a reality.”
Their nonprofit Act of Dog Museum of Compassion project began in Santa Fe about five years ago after Barone and Dervan had moved here from St. Louis. Barone’s dog of 22 years had died and Dervan researched dog adoption, and “started finding out what was happening in the shelter system.” Her rough estimate of the number of shelter dogs killed in a day in the United States came to 5,500, the inspiration for the number of paintings Barone has made. The original plan was to sell the paintings — all on 12-inch-by-12-inch panels, except for 11 wall-sized works representing special cases or issues — to raise $20 million for dog rescue. But they later shifted their goal to a museum that could provide ongoing revenue for animal rescue operations and a place for education efforts. Dervan says that, back in 2011, they got “no help” with the idea from Santa Fe or Albuquerque. Dervan said she approached Santa Fe city officials, although Debra Garcia y Griego, director of the city Arts Commission, said this week she knew of no contact
COUPLE WANTS A ‘MUSEUM OF COMPASSION’
concerning the Act of Dog idea.
“I don’t think anyone thought we would really do it,” said Barone. He started painting the dogs in the small kitchen of a Canyon Road house where Dervan was home-sitting. “From this little kitchen, I only had 60 done,” he said.
Dervan said they made contact with 30 other cities and got positive feedback before the couple decamped to Louisville, where they were given studio space in the private Mellwood Arts Center and low-cost housing. “The guy in Louisville stepped up and we had to go,” said Barone.
He said he worked 1,400 days straight on the paintings. “We took a half day off for Thanksgiving and half day for Christmas,” he said.
“I estimated it would take two years, and it’s taken me four,” Barone said. The resulting paintings, he said, taken together are bigger than the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. “You know, it took Michelangelo four years, and it took me four years — but he had help.”
The paintings were from photos of dogs that couldn’t be saved, provided by rescue groups through Facebook, Dervan said. “It was just non-stop on Facebook” after she built an audience there, she said. The project has attracted news media attention from People magazine, the Huffington Post and CNN’s Headline News, and Barone said magazines in Greece and Italy have also taken note.
Barone said he never wanted to just be a machine cranking out paintings. Well into the project, preparing panels for painting “got to be like (the movie) ‘Groundhog Day’ after a while,” he said. But he says he ended up connecting with all the dogs. “Once I started an individual painting, I got into each one of them,” he said.
About 1,000 of the paintings were damaged and will have to be redone because of a roof collapse caused by a snowstorm at the Louisville location, Barone said. He showed tall, paper-wrapped stacks of bundles in the back of the studio that he said include both the good and damaged dog paintings.
Barone has left five of the small paintings undone so that they can be completed in front of cameras for a public television documentary the couple says in the works.
There was some interest in a museum in Louisville, and the couple also checked out Jacksonville, Fla., but their dream was to come back to Santa Fe for the project, they said.
Art and animal lovers here
“New Mexico — we know they’re animal lovers, we know they’re art lovers, so hopefully someone with the means to help us really brings this vision to life, because it’s really going to help the community,” Dervan said. But she said they’ll go somewhere else if a supporter comes through. “We’re just attached to the outcome of savings lives and getting this done,” she said.
Barone has experience in using art as a community and economic development tool as part of a successful project in Paducah, Ky., that used incentives in the early 2000s to attract artists from around the country to what had been the rundown Lowertown neighborhood. That project won urban planning awards, and positive press from the likes of ABC News, NPR and major newspapers.
Barone and Dervan say their museum would bring in tourists and provide educational programs in “purpose-driven” art for school children. They have a website that now offers T-shirts and prints that they say should start generating enough revenue to provide donations for rescue groups by the end of this year.
Dervan said Barone’s dog art was inspired by the Holocaust Museum and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. — begging the question of why they’ve chosen to focus on animals instead of people.
“There are already so many charities working with children around the world and adults around the world in need, and the huge difference is human beings are not being killed on a daily basis,” said Dervan. “Their lives are not being taken away for no good reason ... and animals do not have a voice.”
“We support all those other groups,” said Barone. But he and Dervan followed their “affinity and passion” to try to help save dogs, he said. He noted that dogs are being used to help people with PTSD and in other therapies for humans.
Dervan added: “We’re trying to develop something that gets to the core of the issue. Whatever is going on in the world, whether we’re killing animals, killing children, starvation, whatever it is, it comes back to the core thing, which is compassion. You’ve got to cultivate compassion.” Barone said: “We see it as a very integrated thing.”
Dervan and Barone have not established a relationship with the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, a respected community institution which a spokesman said euthanizes only animals proven to be dangerous or who are in pain despite measures, including surgery, that try to save them. No animals are killed for lack of space. As many as 97 percent of animals that end up at the shelter annually have been saved, the spokesman said.
Dervan said the shelter is “doing an amazing job” these days, and that she and Barone want to build an “inclusive” platform. She said saving dogs depends on rescue groups and animal fostering programs that free up shelter and rescue space for more dogs.
‘The real crazy’
Act of Dog, Inc., has filed public financial statements required of nonprofits. In 2011, it reported $11,409 in contributions; the total was $39,000 in 2012, most of it reported as being from Barone himself. For 2013 and 2014, Act of Dog filed simpler forms saying its gross receipts are normally less than $50,000. One of the forms reports $12.4 million in assets — a rough estimate of the value of Barone’s paintings, the couple said. “I wish it was cash,” said Barone.
Barone said the project has so far been funded mainly through his retirement savings. When a reporter opined that creating 5,500 paintings was “kind of crazy,” Dervan responded, “We think the real crazy is that 5,500 dogs are killed every day. That’s the real crazy, right?”
NEW MEXICO, WE KNOW THEY’RE ANIMAL LOVERS, WE KNOW THEY’RE ART LOVERS, SO HOPEFULLY SOMEONE WITH THE MEANS TO HELP US REALLY BRINGS THIS VISION TO LIFE. MARINA DERVAN