Valerie Hegarty Prints Available Through Online Gallery 20x200 to Benefit Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn-based artist Valerie Hegarty has created a limited-edition, exhibition-quality print inspired by an Asher B. Durand landscape in the Brooklyn Museum collection that will be available through the online gallery www.20x200.com and at the February 6 Target First Saturday to new and renewing members of the Brooklyn Museum's socially networked Membership tier known as 1stfans. All of the proceeds will benefit the Brooklyn Museum.

The artist has donated the work titled First Harvest in the Wilderness with Pileated Woodpecker. It references the 1855 Asher B. Durand painting The First Harvest in the Wilderness, a landscape allegory commissioned by the Brooklyn Institute, the forerunner of today's Brooklyn Museum. Hegarty's work duplicates a detail of the Durand painting and superimposes a woodpecker making holes in it. Hegarty is represented in the Brooklyn Museum collection with Fallen Bierstadt, making reference to a painting by American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. Her work has been the subject of several solo and group shows, including a recent commission by the High Line that imagined a Hudson River landscape painting left outdoors.

The prints, donated by 20x200, will be available in three sizes. The smallest, measuring 8 by 10 inches and printed in an edition of 200, may be obtained only at the February 6 Target First Saturday, the monthly free evening of art and entertainment at the Brooklyn Museum. The $20 cost includes both the print, as well as membership in 1stfans, which provides paperless benefits through the social networks Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, as well as offering live events at each Target First Saturday, all for an annual fee of $20.

The following week, larger prints will be available online exclusively through 20x200 in two sizes. The price of prints offered online also includes 1stfans membership. Prints measuring 11 by 14 inches will be available in an edition of 500 and priced at $50 each, while only 20 will be printed at 16 by 20 inches and offered for $200 each.

20x200 is a branch of Jen Bekman Projects (JBP). 20x200 offers curated, limited-edition prints at "ridiculously affordable prices" online. The flagship of JBP is an exhibition space for photography, works on paper, paintings, and mixed media in lower Manhattan. Bekman established the space with the mission to bring art to everyone. Her more recent projects, including 20x200, further that objective, fostering an even greater community of artists and art collectors online. 20x200 has done a number of limited-edition-print projects to benefit other nonprofit organizations, among them Aperture, Creative Commons, and the Brooklyn Academy Of Music.

The 1stfans membership at the Brooklyn Museum debuted in January 2009 at a Target First Saturday. It now has more than five hundred members in twenty-three states and in ten countries. The program, which is the first of its kind, combines online interaction via social networks with live events at Target First Saturdays. Each month the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed provides original content from contemporary artists exclusively to 1stfans via Twitter, providing them with unique access to the perspectives of many contemporary people in the arts including Joseph Kosuth, Jonathan Lethem, and Duke Riley. Each Target First Saturday includes an event for 1stfans Members only. 1stfans is the result of collaboration between Membership Manager William Cary and Chief of Technology Shelley Bernstein.

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