Put your mouth where your money is

I am one of 19 artists doing a project at the Sullivan Museum at Norwich University in Northfield VT called Inspired by Stories: Artists Respond to the Historical Collection of the Sullivan Museum.

The museum assembled miscellaneous artifacts from their collection, and each artist chose one to respond to. I chose a roll of bills called a “Short Snorter” (see below, unrolled a bit). You can see some websites that have information about these artifacts here and here and, if you're interested, you can probably find lots more if you search the web.


I found this artifact compelling because it seemed like the male/military version of the friendship/signature quilt. These men collected signatures of their buddies on paper money, sometimes the names of places they had passed through (along with their currencies), sometimes short messages of solidarity or humor.

I would like to create an Art Community Long Snorter (or maybe it will be called Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is) – a long streamer of bills taped together that will be suspended from the ceiling. I'm asking artists and art-community folks to send me a piece of currency with their name(s) and/or signature(s) written directly on the bill, along with a short (snorting?) message you may wish to convey to the world and visitors to the Sullivan Museum. Write it all on the bill; you can include as many people's signatures and/or messages on the bill as you can fit!

It would be wonderful to have currencies from other parts of the world if you have something (not too valuable) you’d like to contribute to this effort (hanging around from a trip to an exotic locale?), but a regular old dollar bill would be fine too. If you don’t want to send money, cut-to-size (about the size of a dollar bill or slightly larger) fragments of maps, two-sided images from magazines or other sources that are meaningful to you, or pieces of travel brochures would also be great.

Please feel free to forward a link to this post to artists you think may be interested in contributing to this artwork.

If you are interested in participating, please send your piece by April 1, 2009 to me at:

Janet Van Fleet
32 Thistle Hill Road
Cabot, VT 05647