Tens of thousands of losing lottery tickets have been reimagined into art pieces by Detroit artist and performer Laura Quattrocchi. Dubbed The Loser Show, the exhibition is described as “comedic” and “tragic,” providing a fun, interactive way for people to contemplate luck, loss, and hope.
The unique pieces will be on display at community arts center Andy Arts, which opened in 2016 at 3000 Fenkell Ave. on the city’s west side. The show is curated in collaboration with DMJ Studios, started by Detroit artist Donna Jackson, who is the resident curator of Andy Arts. The group aims to create exhibitions, installations, and community programming centering women, people of color, urban dwellers, and global citizens.
Quattrrocchi, the artist behind The Loser Show, is originally from Italy, but now lives in the westside neighborhood and is a co-owner of Andy Arts alongside Joshua Bissett. The pair moved to Detroit after living in New York for around 20 years, feeling the need to find a more grassroots community with less gentrification. As their main form of artistic expression is dance, they purchased the 20,000-square-foot building to have an open space for practices, performances, and other arts programming. Now, constant activity happens inside, including a weekly drum circle, open mics, video shoots, gallery shows, and more.
As a visual artist, Quattrocchi focuses heavily on movement and found material, seeking to understand her environment through acts of gathering and transforming everyday objects, lost items, and trash into artworks. This curiosity is how she first began utilizing lottery tickets in her work.
While living in Jersey City, she began noticing tons of lottery tickets on the ground and decided to start collecting them. Unique to the upcoming Detroit show, which consists completely of pale orange Lotto tickets, the first collection featured brightly colored instant lottery tickets.
“I never played Lotto, but I was really curious that in this neighborhood, which was sort of like immigrant, kind of poor neighborhood, every block there was one place where you can buy [lottery tickets],” Quattrocchi says. “In the more affluent areas of Jersey City, there weren’t that many, so they really target these more poor communities.”
When she moved to Detroit, she realized a similar phenomenon, so her art became not only an avenue to explore trash and movement, but also a way to prompt thought around the lottery in general, not just in a specific city, but around the globe.
“I’m not making a comment on Detroit playing Lotto. People play all over the world,” Quattrocchi says. “What I’m interested in is very universal. We lose things in the same way, we play Lotto in the same way, and we litter in the same way, anywhere in the world.”
“I have neighbors that walk every day to the liquor store here to buy the lottery,” she adds.
One neighbor and friend in particular, Andy Jones, has been bringing her big bags of lottery tickets from frequent players in the neighborhood for the past five years. He is also who Andy Arts is named after, in part to thank him for his commitment to taking care of the area near Parkside Street and Fenkell Avenue where the space is located.
“Andy was cutting the grass on the lot that we own when I met him. He just cuts abandoned lots or abandoned homes, he cleans and makes sure that things look nice. I learned that that day,” Quattrocchi says. “When you live in a big city like New York, what happens is you don’t even say hi to your neighbors. I realized that here the reality is very different, that actually the neighbors, him and another woman, and at that time another man, who basically lived their whole life on this block, they were kind of responsible for the fact that the block looks so good because they are like guardians of the block, and they care, they care also about the houses that they don’t own. It was a great example and it gave me inspiration and energy.”
She says that Jones told her that the lottery is his last vice in life.
A piece hanging in the bathroom at Andy Arts shows the impact that this vice can have, stamped with “$872,” highlighting how much money just a small amount of tickets can cost.
“They’re not just $1, you can play $6, $8, the instant lottery is even worse, you can spend $30 on one ticket, so the amount of money that you can spend, it’s significant,” Quattrocchi says. “When you target these communities and that $1 becomes $10, it’s a huge impact because gambling is an addiction.”
While the name of the art show is The Loser Show, as each ticket represents a “loser,” one art piece uses the tickets to spell out the word “hopes,” as for many people, hope is the primary emotion that playing the lottery manifests.
“The tickets are ‘losers,’ but what makes them is their ‘hope’ to win, so these tickets aren’t just losers, they’re also hopes, it’s collective hopes,” Quattrocchi says.
For the upcoming opening of The Loser Show, the artist wants people to know that the event will be interactive and fun for all ages. Among the art installations is a half-full piggy bank sculpture, inviting visitors to participate by crumpling lottery tickets and feeding them through a chute to help fill it up themselves. Another piece is a ball of Lotto tickets that the artist wants people to hug, so they can feel the mass of “hopes” and “losers.” Additionally, there will be T-shirts, darts, and a prize wheel, plus bags of Lotto tickets hanging from the ceiling, ready to cascade down upon people who want to stand beneath them and experience a “lottery ticket shower.”
“It’s not gonna be like the usual art opening, I call it [an] ‘art happening’,” Quattrocchi says. “It’s more of an event where people can look at the artwork, meditate, and they can choose if they want to play.”
The free opening event for The Loser Show will be held on May 4 from 3-6 p.m. An artist talk will take place on May 11 at 4 p.m. Visits to view the show can be made on other days by appointment only.
