What is the Night of a 1000 Drawings?
Night of a 1000 Drawings has been around since 2006 when the Paballo Ya Batho delivery van was stolen.
Upon learning of this unfortunate development, Felix Frankenberger and David Quan Chong put their brains together and came up with the idea of Night Of A 1000 Drawings to raise funds with the aim to replace the much relied on vehicle. Knowing that a fair bit of organising would be required, Kelly McGillivray was roped in to help bring this unique inner-city art exhibition to life. Funnily enough though, during the planning phase a new vehicle was donated to Paballo Ya Batho, which kind of made us stop and ask: “Well should we still be doing this?” Resoundingly, everybody said “Of course!” and so just like that a new stream of help and kindness opened up to Paballo Ya Batho. The 1000 Drawings project was gaining momentum.
The Night of A 1000 Drawings exhibition is an art-for-charity initiative, changing lives across Johannesburg. Everyone (both amateur and professional artists) are encouraged to create and donate A5 masterpieces.
Your A5 artworks could either be doodles, sketches, paintings, photographs, etchings, embroidery, all of the above, or anything really in any art form you choose – as long as it’s an A5. Your art will then be sold off for R200 each and all proceeds are donated to inner-city charities.
Since that first foray into hosting Night Of A 1000 Drawings, we've hosted the event many times over the past couple of years, up until 2019 – we all know what happened in 2020 :( Each year has been successful in raising funds to make a difference for various inner-city charities in Johannesburg.
In South Africa many underprivileged youth battle with access to good quality education due to circumstances beyond their control and art can be the change for many. Therefore all the art donated to 1000Drawings is collected and are then exhibited as a massive inner-city art exhibition.