Designer Bella Freud and LA-based celebrity stylist Karla Welch have joined forces to launch a limited run of eight t-shirts for charity featuring the works of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Ellen Gallagher, John Giorno, Beatriz Milhazes, Annie Morris and Ugo Rondinone. Each artist or their estate personally chose their own piece for this philanthropic project.
100% of all proceeds of sales from this collection to East LA Women’s Center and Southall Black Sisters, two charities that support the victims of domestic abuse, which has escalated sharply since the COVID-19 devastation.
“Since I was a child I have been preoccupied with bullying and people not standing up for each other when awful things are being done – often in plain sight,” Bella Freid Explained.”When I was 8 I saw a book of photographs of people imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Men, women and children, living skeletons but still just alive, looking into the camera. Someone took those photographs and they published them and let the world know.”
As the writer James Baldwin famously and beautifully wrote ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ When terrible things are happening it is so overwhelming that people think nothing they can do can ever make a difference – and turn away. But there is ALWAYS something that can be done and it starts with not turning away.
– Bella Freud, Creative Director & Founder Bella Freud
Going on to explain, “Anything, however small is it, is caring. And it is the caring that starts the change, people helping each other and being kind. That is when you can see what it is you can do to help. If we don’t turn away we start to notice what can be done, however small the gesture is – it is huge. Opening our hearts to people instead of closing up in fear will change things by itself.”
