Thanks For Sharing: The Art of Instant, Global Inspiration

There’s no doubt about the connective power of Instagram. At any given moment you can open the app and digest hordes of art and visual inspiration from artists and creatives that, if not given the platform to post their work on, you would have never heard or known of.

It’s unbelievable how many relationships we’ve fostered with artists through Instagram. We’re constantly scrolling through our feed and explore page, mining the next artist we’d like to feature online or in the print magazine. And with the amount of visual stimulation we regularly interact with, we unknowingly, or knowingly, are influenced by the people we “follow”.

Artist Mike Biskup has been quite intrigued by this network of sharing and subconscious influence. It was something he started to recognize in his own work once he started posting and consuming content on Instagram daily. As a resident of Port Townsend, Washington with it’s population of 10,000, no major art museums, and a very small contemporary art scene, Mike found Instagram to be an amazing way to easily discover artists working around the world, and also grow the number of artists and others that could discover him.

In an attempt to portray the dynamics of a universally connected network of artists sharing with each other, he’s curated an awesome group show — Thanks for Sharing: The Art of Instant, Global Inspiration — with nineteen contemporary artists from ten different countries that have all connected via Instagram to inspire and influence each other regularly. These artists, which include Mike, Mina Hamada, Robert Pokorny, Tim Biskup, Sophie Roach, and Josh Jefferson, amongst several others, share their work with nearly 200,000 “followers”, and cultivate valuable relationships with other artists, collectors, and arts organizations.

“Today, as the US republican administration blabs aimlessly about making “America First,” Thanks for Sharing: The Art of Instant, Global Inspiration makes the case that we humans are all in this together and that humankind can maximize it’s peaceful potential by working together, sharing ideas, and respecting one another,” says Mike Biskup.

“Thanks for Sharing: The Art of Instant, Global Inspiration” opens April 1st at Northwind Arts Center from 5:30-8:00pm. The show will run through the end of April.