Project Pizza is an online pop-up shop that raises money to fight hunger though the sales of food-themed art.

I started Project Pizza as a way to bring together two parts of my life: First, as anyone who has spent ten minutes around me can tell you, I love eating and sharing food. Second, as an artist I’m frankly often frustrated about my capacity to help make the world better. Like most other artists, I have way more creativity, energy, and visibility than money. So with over 17 million homes across America facing food insecurity, it felt urgent to come up with a way to use our art to multiply our community’s artistic endeavors to help out the hungry far beyond our otherwise limited pocketbooks. 

All the art, resources, and time for Project Pizza are donated, with 100% of the profits of this pop-up going to the awesome non-profit Food Forward. Their project is both simple and radical: Combating both the epidemics of food waste and hunger, they travel to farmers' markets, local farms, and even backyards, to collect the surplus bounty that would otherwise be thrown away. This is the same top-quality produce being used in the best restaurants—delicious but with a very short shelf life. Food Forward collects and transports all those cases of otherwise unwanted peak-ripeness produce to hunger relief groups in underserved and at-need communities. Every $1 redirects about 11 pounds of food from being thrown away to instead feed the hungry, and in the process reconnects the oft-fragmented groups in our local communities.

For this inaugural pop-up, I’m joined by renowned installation artist and graphic novelist Shing Khor sharing her paintings of the iconic foods of Los Angeles. My contribution is the first chance to collect a new photographic series of utterly flattened food. 

You get art, the hungry get food, and our community thrives!   

Open 7AM Friday December 8 to Midnight Sunday December 10!