News writer
In honor of June Pride Month, the New York Lottery is featuring artwork by LGBTQIA+ artists in an initiative called The Art Werk Gallery.
What is the initiative?
Pride, a celebration of queer identity of all stripes, is extremely popular in New York, attracting 2.5 million people to a main March in Manhattan. Countless events crop up all over the city and upstate throughout June. Often, businesses sponsor Pride events to promote their brands and messages of allyship.
This year, New York Lottery teamed up with advertising agency McCann New York to build The Art Werk Gallery, a virtual “gallery” of selected artworks by five queer-identifying artists. The selected works of art are being featured on the New York Lottery website, on 14,000 digital screens in the wild throughout the state, through social channels, and on retail signage all month long, according to Campaign Live. The virtual gallery features a vintage rainbow theme.
In mid-June, art lovers will get a chance to win original pieces and limited-edition prints from the gallery, according to McCann. The tagline of the campaign is: “We all win when queer artists shine.”
The New York Lottery appears to be featured in the initiative in name only - there's no clear lottery integration, just an artist showcase. This seems prudent; anything more could detract from the message.
Who are the artists?
The five diverse, working artists include Marcos Chin, a Chinese-American illustrator and mixed media artist; Andina Marie Osorio, a Puerto Rican photography and image-based artist; Audra Linsner, a painter and muralist; Rani Som, a Bengali-American transgender visual artist with a graphic novel background; and Jarrett Key, an artist who captures the Black American experience by integrating movement, song, and painting.
The artists' impressive portfolios are available on the New York Lottery Art Werk Gallery site. Key spoke in a video on the New York Lottery Instagram page:
I like to encourage younger queer artists - or really any queer artists - to really believe in what they're doing. Your voice matters. Your stories matter. Speak up. Make that piece you've been thinking about. Don't give up on yourself. Our contributions and our voices matter.
Other brands are pulling out of Pride
Lots of big brands backed out of sponsoring New York Pride this year, thanks to tighter marketing budgets and an anti-diversity political climate promoted by President Donald Trump, according to The Drum. New York City Pride reported a decrease of $750,000 in sponsorships after Mastercard, Citi, Nissan, Target, and PepsiCo withheld or dropped support.
Though the Art Werk Gallery may seem like a small artistic statement by the New York Lottery, it stands out as a bold act given the downward trends.
The New York Lottery climate
The New York Lottery is consistently hailed as the most successful, profitable lottery in the country. In 2024, lottery sales of over $10 billion far outpaced other states. Since 1967, the New York Lottery has contributed $86 billion to the New York public education system. Perhaps its success makes the lottery immune to fairweather trends and politics, allowing it to take artistic and social risks on behalf of marginalized groups.
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