A new book to commemorate 10 years of the Art for Recovery initiative has just been completed and is now available for ordering as part of fundraising efforts for the local non profit Transforming Youth Recovery.
The non profit Art for Recovery has released the book of the same name which has as its subhead: A Decade of Creative Expression to Inspire Change in Treating Addiction. It is a full-color, 300-page coffee-table book with prints of “260 artworks produced by artists recruited to create works depicting the darkness of addiction and brightness of recovery,” according to a press release shared with Our Town Reno.
“Addiction is blind to someone’s social standing, education, ethnicity, religion or region. It hits every group of people. And it will take all of us to turn back its rising tide,” Mathewson says, with a wrist tattoo honoring her son.
“Art for Recovery’s mission is as vital as ever,” says Art for Recovery founder, Stacie Mathewson — who herself lost her son to the opioid crisis, in 2013. “This book will be an enduring testament to the need for our nation to develop more accessible and effective education and treatment for substance abuse in our communities. This book — with its evocative artworks — is a reminder that the crisis is real, and healthcare solutions are urgently needed.”
Mathewson is also the executive director of the Stacie Mathewson Foundation in Reno, which according to her LinkedIn, aims “to foster and support a family and youth recovery movement that produces monumental change in the way the nation views, supports and communicates about the disease of addiction.”
Art for Recovery: A Decade of Creative Expression to Inspire Change in Treating Addiction, is available in standard edition ($40 plus shipping and handling) and a deluxe, slipcase edition ($100 plus shipping and handling). Each edition is hardback with foil-stamped covers. Copies of the book can be ordered by emailing TYR@sbjreno.com
There will also be a big auction related to the book’s release on September 23 at the Nevada Museum of Art starting at 6 p.m. for which tickets are now being sold.
Art for Recovery began in 2014, when the non-profit organization put out a call for local artists to decorate antique doors with themes related to addiction and recovery.
Thirty-eight doors were then displayed around town and auctioned off at the Nevada Museum of Art to benefit Transforming Youth Recovery, which according to its Facebook page “is leading the charge for children … with prevention, intervention, and recovery support services.”
Over the years, 260 original artworks have been created as part of this initiative, with 160 artists taking part, including a few examples above.
“Here in 2023, there’s a seemingly unending epidemic of catastrophic drug misuse and abuse threatening our nation’s youth, and our society as a whole,” Mathewson says in the press release for the new book. “While heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine have not gone away, recreational marijuana has not only become legal in many states, it is more potent than ever. What’s more, hardcore narcotics such as fentanyl have found their way not only onto the street but into schools and workplaces. The opioid crisis has upped the stakes on the perils of drug abuse. One casualty was my own son, Josh, whose accidental death proved fatal, making him one of the more than 560,000 Americans to perish from an opioid overdose in the past two decades.”