It's about Love.
It's about Community.
It's about Healing.
The heart-lifting effort to collect 10,000 photographs of the affectionately-inclined from around the world.
JOANNE MCGIBBON was a Smooch! Project Dreamer for only six months. Time enough for this energetic woman to have a profound effect on the project. She also made a great impression on the other members of the Dream Team, that stalwart group of people helping to move this heart-lifting project forward. We found the perfect job for Joanne: Creating Smooch! artwork for Art-o-Mat dispensers, retired cigarette machines converted to vend art. Joanne so loved the process of carefully gluing the printed paper to small wood blocks. She was both meticulous and extremely productive, completing 200 of these little blocks in less than two months. Examples of her work can now be found in Art-o-Mat machines across the nation. Sadly, Joanne was also living with Stage 4 cancer. Despite this, she was fully engaged in living her life. Given her health prognosis, I felt a need to understand why she would choose to spend any of her precious time volunteering for The Smooch! Project? Of course, she loved the project itself and wanted to support it. But it was even more than this. “When I work on these little blocks, I forget all about my body,” she told me. “Yesterday, I had 5 hours of time where I had no thought of my cancer. You have no idea how great a gift that is to me!” I was greatly moved that her support of this project was, in turn, supporting her as well. In early October, Joanne’s brilliant light flickered and then abruptly went out. During her stint as a Dreamer, she became a dear friend. I’m happy we had the opportunity to photograph her with her youngest son, Brian, less than a month before her health took a turn for the worse. This photo now adorns more than 50 commemorative Art-o-Mat blocks, distributed among her family and in Art-o-Mat machines throughout the U.S. One of them now adorns my desk. I am grateful to Joanne for so much — her contributions to The Smooch! Project as well as her friendship. Safe journey, dear friend, wherever you may be!
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