This is not exactly art (in fact, it’s an unused snot rag), but… for completeness’s sake.
My husband has a proclivity for claiming things that people don’t need any more and putting them to use. When I met him, most of this stuff and even most of his clothes were not things he’d actually picked up, but things he’d taken out of his various basements from a changing cast of roommates. I had met him working at a very weird and very specific call center. When he had started working there a year prior he had exactly two shirts to wear and both had belonged to a much shorter roommate. He’d been pretty clinically depressed and working for cash for his landlord for several years, so he didn’t have anything “business casual” to wear.
One of his roommates he loves to tell stories about was probably about four inches taller than me. His name was Sam. Sam was always trying to make $10 last four weeks and doing things like eating plain white rice with plain black beans for four meals a day. He was obsessed with mountain biking and hammocking (a goofy passtime where you… wander around until you find a place to put a hammock, then hang out in the hammock for hours before finding another place that you can hang your hammock… it’s weirdly popular with the young set around here. I just keep my hammock in my yard…). He was always getting spur of the moment ideas that he then had to execute before he changed his mind and one of these was that he was going to totally redecorate his room.
So this Homerun Hanky is one of the items that Sam purged from his room. My husband is a baseball fan, he loves being disappointed by the Twins every year, so when I met him, this was hanging above his bed. I asked him about it right away, because he was not alive in 1987. He told me he’d taken it from the basement and I knew right then and there that someday this was going to be hanging in my kitchen under my red clock.
I love collecting things that have years of significance attached to them. I have a vintage button collection of patriotic holiday celebrations in the town I live from the year I was born, I bought my vintage Zenith watch because it was manufactured the year my mother was born, I just threw out my Neil Young and Crazy Horse tour t-shirt with 1976 stamped on it. 1987 was the year I was born.
Tomorrow you’ll get to see some real, actual art bought directly from the artist and I know at least two of you will love the irony of it.
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