Blog / 2021 / Tiger Fun and Brenda Dunn
August 4, 2021
When you show up at the Princeton Public Library’s Letter Love exhibit in person, you get a special prize: a tiger sticker made from this brand new Explorer painting!
But the sticker is only for those who live up to the tiger’s name. You must go through the exhibit, which is full of animal facts, and choose one to share with the librarian at the information desk on the second floor who will then hand over your own personal tiger, like Nathalie is doing here.
If it were up to me alone, the stickers would have been distributed at the discretion of the librarians during the PPL’s summer activities. While that’s not a terrible system, the addition of the explorer element certainly makes the tiger prize more interesting, and that only happened because of Brenda Dunn, AKA Art in Jest, or, as I like to call her: Brenda the Bottomless Well of Creative Ideas.
(For the record, I don’t believe Brenda is physically bottomless—we’ve only ever met via Zoom so I can’t 100% confirm. That said, I know for a fact that she, like all artists, is not actually creatively bottomless. Please consider fueling her art through Patreon or doing one of her Skillshare classes!)
Brenda the Bottomless is all about community engagement. A few years ago, she scattered hundreds of duplo blocks around Ottawa, each with a message inviting those who found them to join her in putting together a sculpture out of the blocks at an opening for an exhibit of her work. More recently, she created a seventy foot long coloring book page and asked art lovers to help her color it in. And all this is on top of her hilarious habit of turning our faults and funnies into narrative noshes in picture form, as you can see above.
Brenda is inspiring on many levels, not just when it comes to thinking about how to encourage your audience to get involved in your art.
All of which is to say, please make both the Bottomless Wonder and me proud: get your tiger sticker before the end of the month!
Letter Love
Princeton Public Library
65 Witherspoon
Princeton, NJ 08542
Open: through August 31st
Hours: 10a to at least 5p every day except Sunday, when it’s 1p to 5p
UPDATE
August 10, 2021
The show has been extended! It will remain on display at the library through the end of September.
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