Brave Heart Puts Buoys Up for Auction

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Category: News

Created on Wednesday, 18 September 2024 15:05

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    The annual Brave Heart buoys and chairs auction launched today – a week later than planned due to the citywide internet outage – and will continue through Wednesday, September 25, with dozens of hand-painted buoys and some furniture up for bid.
    The week-long online auction is a fundraiser for Brave Heart Volunteers, which provides companionship, as well as social and emotional support, for residents who are in grief, dying, in hospice or lonely.

Buoys up for auction hang in the Island Artists Gallery today. (Sentinel Photo)

    The non-profit organization’s core mission is to provide “companionship, respite and education to those facing loneliness, grief and end of life,” board president Michele Friedman told the Sentinel.
    “The service that we’ve been doing for 23 years now is free of charge,” she said. “So thanks to our volunteers and our donors and grants and fundraisers, we can make those services, all our services, free. And I think, this fundraiser is about 30 percent of our fundraising income... So yes, you’re getting a buoy when you participate in this auction, you are getting a chair or buoy if you win the auction bid for that one. But it’s really about supporting Brave Heart and the work that we’re doing.”
    This year’s auction includes 30 buoys, a table and two chairs from a number of artists. The fundraising goal is $25,000, with $7,000 of that already brought in through corporate sponsorships.
    The organization’s annual budget is $140,000, Friedman noted, meaning it takes about $400 a day to keep the lights on.
    The buoys up for auction are displayed online at Brave Heart’s website, braveheartvolunteers.org, as well as on the auction site, https://www.32auctions.com/BuoysandChairs2024.
    Bidders must first make an account on the 32auctions site, then bid on items in, at minimum, $25 increments. The auction is only online. Those who wish to see the artwork in person will have a chance to do so Saturday at the Island Artists Gallery on Lincoln Street from 5 to 7 p.m., with music and refreshments.
    “The diversity of the different artists is really striking. There’s a lot of variety, and it’s beautiful,” Friedman said.
    A unique buoy crafted by Marty Johnson is one of those on offer. The piece includes a working porthole and depicts sail-powered fishing boats plying Bristol Bay, with a small sailboat on the inside.
    “My buoy is really a tribute to Alaska fishing, and specifically Bristol Bay fishing,” Marty Johnson told the Sentinel by phone. “My father fished in sailboats there for 13 seasons, and then he continued on to fish another 50, 55 years. And I fished in Bristol Bay for 50 years gillnetting, partly with my father, and then on my own boat permit. And so when I started fishing up (there) those were still sailboats that had been converted to power.”
    Originally from Juneau, Johnson, now 70, lived in Sitka for 30 years, commercial fishing here as well as in Bristol Bay.
    Amy Sweeney painted a buoy that depicts herring swimming through a kelp forest, and she cut away a chunk of the buoy in order to hang the herring on the inside, each one of the tiny silver fish crafted from a used can.
    “I really like to kind of open up the buoys and use the inside as well as the outside. That’s one of my favorite things about it. It’s sort of an engineering challenge more than an artistic challenge,” Sweeney said. “And so this year, I made a buoy that has kelp strands on the outside, and then it’s cut open, and inside there’s like a mobile sculpture of herring swimming around inside of it.”
    Sweeney isn’t new to the buoy auction; this is her fourth year submitting an item. Though she normally paints animals in acrylic on flat, wooden surfaces, she enjoys the experience of painting on a sphere.
    “It’s just really fun to be involved in this project that has a whole lot of different artists in town doing different things and it supports a cause I really think is worthwhile,” Sweeney said. “And then just the challenge of trying to come up with something new every year, and how to bring it to life, and then see what everybody else has done. I’ve learned a lot from seeing how others worked with painting on a spherical surface.”
    Other items up for auction now through next Wednesday include a table with faces carved into the legs by Randy Ferguson; an Alaskan starscape buoy painted by Brave Heart executive director Angie DelMoral; a trio of ravens on a buoy by Pat Kehoe; and a handful of buoys painted by artist DJ Robidou, among many others.
    Bids start at $200, and each item has a “buy now” price of $2,000. For the first time this year, folks who wish to make a donation in the buoy auction but can’t afford to bid on pricey items can donate $200 or $400, also on the auction page.
    The online auction is underway now.

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