WORDS WORDS WORDS

Mba Fabrications Inc.

On Friday May 24th, Heron Arts will present a new performance/installation by Donald Ian McCaw called WORDS WORDS WORDS. Equal parts art exhibition and corporate launch event, visitors will be part of an immersive theatrical experience where nothing is what it seems to be. McCaw will be present to make special presentations at 7pm and again at 9pm. This will be his second show at Heron Arts, following up on ARTPAK: THE WEST COAST LAUNCH in March of 2017.

In 2010, Canadian entrepreneur Donald Ian McCaw founded Mba Fabrications Inc., ‘North America’s Leading Corporate Producer of Fine Art’. His stated goal was to introduce advanced business practices to every aspect of how paintings are made and marketed. The company has specialized in paradigm-breaking innovation since its inception.

Mba’s latest offering is a line of brightly colored, text-based paintings, inspired by the sale of Christopher Wool’s Untitled (RIOT) for $29.9 million in 2015. That painting, consisting of four letters stenciled on a plain background, forced McCaw to rethink everything he thought he knew about the relationship between effort and reward in the fine art market. The hard part, however, was figuring out what exactly Mba’s new text-based paintings should say.

The breakthrough came when McCaw discovered the website unbartletts.com, a modern take on the venerable reference work Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Employing a ‘competitive voting’ model, the website crowdsourced an alternative collection of sayings from under-represented writers and obscure publications. McCaw announced an agreement with unbartletts.com CEO Liam O’Dowd in November 2018 to turn the most popular quotations on the website into paintings, and the results are currently on display at select galleries throughout North America.

Read coverage on SF Weekly →