On Monday, February 28th, the moving trailer that was transporting the entire Sketchbook Project collection from Brooklyn to St. Pete caught fire while driving through Baltimore. We are incredibly thankful that everyone involved in the accident is safe and not hurt.

We are lucky to report that around 70% of the The Sketchbook Project collection was saved by volunteers and firefighters who heroically moved the books off as fast as possible at the scene. Following, community members from a local church helped move each box of books into their parking lot one by one. The majority of the unharmed books arrived in St Pete today and are safe and sound. We are beginning to assess the damage, but we estimate we may have lost around 7,000 books of the collection and most of our supplies that helped us operate as an organization.

At this devastating moment, we are asking our community to please consider donating to help us right now to rebuild our platform. We need the resources to hire help, and the time to pause and reorganize our planned partnerships and exhibitions so that we can recover and come back stronger. The loss of each sketchbook is unimaginable, but to lose the spirit of the collection and the mission of the project’s creative community we have spent years cultivating would be even worse.

This community means so much to us and we are incredibly grateful for your support.

Next Steps

Our team plans to pause from everyday operations to shift gears into assessing the damage of each sketchbook and how we will move forward with salvaging the collection. Additionally, we will be turning off new submissions to The Sketchbook Project and ask that you wait to send your book back to us if you are still in the process of working on it. We will send an update when we are able to receive submissions again.

For the time being, we will be suspending all email support to focus our efforts on cleaning this up. Thank you for your patience. If you want to help us in our rebuilding efforts, please consider donating to help us rebuild or sharing our GoFundMe with your friends.

How Do I Know If My Book Is Safe?

We are working as hard as we can to sort through what is damaged or has arrived safely, but predict it will be months until we can notify everyone. We ask that you please give us some time to do this efficiently. We understand how scary and devastating this is for you and our entire community at large, but please know we are doing absolutely everything we can.