Buyers embrace Goodwill artwork created by people with disabilities

COLUMBUS (AP) — Of the four legs on this especially cheery-looking reindeer, only one is the requisite brown.

Thomas Tyler chose blue, orange-red and peach for the other three because, he said, he listens to himself.

“My mind tells me what to do,” Tyler said. “I think, and then my mind tells me what color.”

For any artist, the essential question is pretty much the same: What to create? In elite circles, the answer might be influenced — some would say corrupted — by culture, history and speculation about what someone else finds attractive.

Not so much at the Goodwill Art Studio and Gallery.

Here, Tyler and 129 other artists with physical and mental disabilities paint, draw, sew, sculpt and weave from the heart. Reindeer reflect rainbows, puffy clouds get purple linings, cut-up credit cards become necklaces, and tiny balls of dryer lint make dangly earrings.

The art is all fresh, all honest, and the public can’t seem to get enough of it.

“That’s been the lovely, serendipitous, unintended outcome,” said Goodwill Columbus President Margie Pizzuti. “People have embraced this as serious art.”

Advocates for the disabled have long known that creative expression can be therapeutic for their clients. But the fruits of those happy labors didn’t necessarily go anywhere.

Now, “things are selling, things are moving,” said Kevin Kowalski, a longtime central Ohio arts patron and collector. “People are responding and reacting, and they’re purchasing.”

Kowalski, one of the volunteers who helped start the Goodwill studio three years ago, said many of the pieces convey an innocence that naturally draws people in.

Kowalski displays Goodwill art in his home, along with extravagant glass works by contemporary artists such as Dale Chihuly. “It doesn’t matter if it’s by a disabled artist or not,” he said. “It’s what talks to you.”

Larry Crombie is no Dale Chihuly, but Crombie also has his own line: Larry Art. Crombie’s happy monsters and big-toothed fish adorn sweat shirts, T-shirts, ceramic tiles and more in the Goodwill gallery retail shop, a storefront space in the nonprofit group’s newly renovated building.