You Are Enough: Chicago Artist Matthew Hoffman Spreads a Message of Hope Around the World
By Suzanne Hanney
Newly moved to Chicago in 2002, Matthew Hoffman experienced a moment of insecurity that led him to create “You Are Beautiful,” (YAB) a positive message he has since spread all over the world via 6.5 million stickers, public art installations and the Oprah Network. More recently, his work has included art around the expressions, “It’s OK Not to be OK,” a collaboration with the Hope For The Day suicide prevention non-profit, and a T-shirt for Giveashi*t to benefit StreetWise that proclaims, “We Are All Equal.”
“I was born in Ohio and we moved around a lot in Ohio and Indiana,” Hoffman said in a telephone interview. “I went to school in Indiana, at Ball State for graphic design. We would take the South Shore [train] into the city to go to the museums. I was always seeing that skyline and being blown away by it. I did eventually come to Chicago in 2002 for a publications firm. I was on my own; I didn’t have friends or family. It made it really exciting. I had never been in a larger urban environment before. It was incredible but there was also a lot of chaos, visible noise, audible noise, advertisements I had never experienced, kind of playing on your insecurity. It was also, in my opinion, the golden age of street art. I had seen things online with the message: ‘Be yourself. That’s enough.’ I wanted to make that calming message.”
Online printing was unavailable at the time, so Hoffman found a printer who made sticker business cards proclaiming “You are Beautiful” in his now-iconic black type on silver square. “I am all about doing, doing, throwing it out in the world and revising it from there. I had 100 and I put them up all over the place. I was living in Wicker Park and because they were paper, they quickly disappeared because of the rain and the harsh climate. I noticed that on doors of restaurants there were locksmith stickers, warning stickers that you just gloss over. The idea was the silver sticker was designed to blend in, be obtrusive. When it hits you, it’s a little bit of positive.”
With installations in Andersonville, Uptown, Roscoe Village, Pullman, Englewood and more, You Are Beautiful has no socioeconomic boundaries, which Hoffman calls his proudest achievement.
“My intention was to keep it completely open to everyone and that has been the case: young skater guys slapping up stickers as they go down the sidewalk and moms taking their family to brunch on Sunday,” Hoffman said. He sees people from all walks of life at the YAB brick-and-mortar headquarters/store, which opened in late 2018 at 3368 N. Elston Ave. The diversity is even more apparent online, where YAB passed the 6.5 million mark for stickers in 2020.
Hoffman started the project with a single-page website and a still-standing offer of five free stickers to anyone who sends in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Before long, Hoffman was receiving letters with photos of stickers on landmarks all over the world: Amsterdam, Mongolia, Brussels, Vietnam, Russia, Cambodia, the Great Wall of China and even Antarctica, where someone stickered a stuffed penguin and placed it in a field of real penguins.
“For me, the most meaningful part has been the response from the people the message has touched,” Hoffman said on the YouTube video from the Oprah Network’s SuperSoul Sunday. “I just know how important it is if I am having a down day and something or someone does something to pick me up. To be able to do that for other people is incredible. It’s about the message and about spreading it. This is a message everyone needs to hear.”
Isn’t “You Are Enough” really the common denominator to his works? StreetWise asked Hoffman.
“Absolutely. There’s so much going on, so many voices, people, and companies vying for your attention. And your pocketbook. It gets overwhelming and confusing. I am solely talking from a personal standpoint. To have moments to be reminded everything’s OK and you’re enough – that’s essential.”
A couple of days of reflection afterward, Hoffman emailed to say that he liked the way the interview kept circling back to “You Are Enough” as the framework for his art. “I’d like to make a fence installation with this phrase and donate it to a community. If that at all makes sense to mention in the article – and that neighborhoods could reach out to get it—wonderful.”
Hoffman’s art “can help shape the community, reminding people what things are important,” @properties co-founder Thaddeus Wong told Redeye in regard to the “love” mural Hoffman did on their Bucktown headquarters. “Matthew Hoffman’s art makes people feel wonderful.”
Similarly, “What You Do Matters” was the message Hoffman created for the logo, buttons, tote bags and T-shirts for The Chicago Community Trust’s centennial.
“We wanted to stress that it isn’t just the million-dollar donations but also the clothing drives, the soup kitchens, shoveling snow from your neighbor’s driveway, mentoring kids and reading to the elderly – what you do matters,” Eva Penar, then-marketing and communications director for The Trust, told Redeye.
Hoffman’s latest work is a silver-on-black T-shirt for Giveashi*t to benefit StreetWise, proclaiming “we are all equal.”
“I am really a fan of StreetWise and the model and what it does,” Hoffman said. “I think it’s an incredible cause. I was talking with Scott [Marvel, president of the Daily Planet, of which Giveashi*t is a subsidiary] and he said that’s the general idea they were playing with this year, that ‘we are all equal.’ I said that’s perfect, that’s what it should be. For me the simplest phrase says the most and I went right with it.”
“We were looking to expand our artist talent pool and I’ve never met Matthew but I know his work is very positive,” Marvel said of his decision to reach out to Hoffman as a contributing artist. “We try to get positive messages out there. We emailed him and got an email back right away.”
Hoffman’s T-shirt design proclaims “a simple, classic, positive message,” Marvel said. “It’s clearly hand-drawn; it kind of mimics the classic ‘You Are Beautiful.’
“Some people gravitate to wearing a saying: ‘Empathy Rocks,’ ‘We are Born to Wander,’” Marvel said. “Those things hit a target of our audience. Some people see a T-shirt almost as a bumper sticker to put a message out into the world: ‘This is a saying I literally stand behind.’ We love the design so much it’s the first design we’ve done on a onesie.” However, the onesie features a centralized logo because Hoffman’s original design put the words where a chest pocket would be – and a onesie doesn’t have room for a pocket big enough for legible words.
While the original YAB stickers featured the message in black typeface on a silver background, Hoffman has since added a cursive version in wood. Both are trademarked now, but he says the block type and cursive versions deliver two different psychological effects.
The stickers are meant to blend in as signage. “It catches you a little off guard.” But the cursive — and anything hand-drawn – “makes it a little more direct. A person is trying to tell me something. You see that through the human touch.”
Early on, Hoffman was doing outdoor installations – often without permission – attached to broken down fences or boarded up buildings. To make them look legitimate, he made the YAB block letters bigger, and from wood.
In 2005, he did an official collaboration on scaffolding for Block 37 construction that ran the entire block of State Street between Washington and Randolph Streets; 250 artists joined him in a 300-foot-long piece that spelled out You Are Beautiful in 13 languages. The mural remained in place for four years, which reminded Hoffman that his outdoor artwork could last. After a YAB piece had been in a Chicago Cultural Center exposition, Hoffman placed it at the Oakwood exit off South Lake Shore Drive. “Individuals, the city and the park district have been great to us,” he said.
Eco-Andersonville, an initiative of the non-profit Andersonville Sustainable Community Alliance, which is under the chamber of commerce umbrella, sought to use Hoffman’s public art to create community. It staged a Kickstarter campaign in February 2015 that raised $7,312 from 180 backers to bring three YAB installations to the neighborhood.
“I tried to identify parts of the neighborhood that are underutilized or overlooked and to figure out ways to reimagine those spaces in ways that generate community or create points of community interaction,” then-Andersonville Sustainable Programs Manager Brian Bonanno said in the Kickstarter video. Extra funding above the $5,000 goal was “offered as a donation to a community that can use a positive message,” Hoffman said on the video.
A version of YAB went up in Englewood, catty-corner from Kusanya Café, 825 W. 69th St., whose proprietors helped Bonanno and Hoffman gain permission from the owners of the fenced property. Greater Englewood Development Corporation had partnered with the Andersonville group, and made the Kusanya introduction.
“We know everyone loves them, we point them out on tours and people take photos of them,” Andersonville Chamber of Commerce Director of Marketing Joelle Scillia said.
The chamber and Special Service Area 22 placed a fourth piece of Hoffman’s art in Andersonville: the “Anything is Possible” mural on the side of the Jewel food store at 5516 N. Clark St. The store’s wall had unintentionally created a barrier for many people between the north and south ends of the neighborhood. The hope was that people would come and see the artwork and realize that there were more businesses beyond it, Scillia said. Hoffman presented three different slogans, the chamber picked the finalist and Jewel’s corporate headquarters gave final approval.
“Anything is Possible,” (which Hoffman also placed on the Audubon School with the help of the Roscoe Village Neighbors Association), along with “You Are Beautiful” and “Go for It,” are the three most popular sayings for school installations, Hoffman said. However, for the St. Matthias School fence at the northeast corner of Western and Ainslie in Lincoln Square, Hoffman met with each grade level and talked about what was important to them. Although the whole student body voted, the older students picked the phrase “Be Your Best Self.” Middle schoolers determined the mosaic patterning and the youngest pupils the multi-color scheme.
“I feel getting people involved in making it is not only a fun process. Now those kids for rest of their lives can say, ‘I helped make that; that is my contribution,’” Hoffman said.
Uptown United’s executive director had been at the Andersonville chamber during the mural project, which led to another cursive You Are Beautiful installation at the northeast corner of Sunnyside Avenue and Broadway, on the fence of a closed Chicago Public School that is now the Stewart School Loft apartments.
The site was chosen, said Justin Weidl, Uptown United business district manager, because it is a high-traffic area catty-corner from a Target store and across the street from an Aldi. The fence was also on public property, since Kenmore Avenue used to go all the way through to Sunnyside Avenue and the Chicago Department of Transportation kept the right of way, which is now used by the Peterson Garden Project. It’s public space with high visibility.
“All of our art is trying to send a positive message. There was such a good reaction to Matthew, it opened the way to doing more art in the neighborhood,” Weidl said – such as the wall of murals in the 4600 block of North Clifton Street, just north of the CTA Red Line Wilson station.
Enough remaining funds were left over from the cursive YAB that Uptown United asked Hoffman to do a mural version in an alley off the south side of Lawrence Avenue, between Winthrop and Kenmore, east of the Aragon Ballroom. Hoffman put out a call on Instagram at 10 p.m. and had 30 volunteer painters the next morning.
Uptown United also facilitated a Hoffman work on a building at Sheridan and Irving Park Roads owned by Thorek Hospital. Zappos online shoe company sponsored installations all over the U.S. with the theme of “Less is More.” Hoffman designed the word “More” in his iconic cursive embedded with the word “Less.”
“It resonated so much with what I do, working with what you have, figuring out how to do the most with the least amount of stuff you have,” Hoffman said.
“I am certainly a maker, an artist, first — long before I was a businessperson, and I have accidentally fallen into this and struggled with it a bit,” he said. “In business you are supposed to figure out your target demographic. With the message being open to all, there is no demographic. It’s accepted by many people across the board and in many different ways. Until about year and half ago we had been working out of the garage in my house. We were exploding out the seams way past when we should have moved. I am always someone who says, ‘just make it happen.’ That is the way I work: try things and a good amount of stuff doesn’t work, but some things do. Gravitate toward those things and keep having fun with it.”
When YAB got its headquarters building in Avondale, Hoffman met with then-Ald. Deb Mell (33rd ward) and donated a bilingual English/Spanish YAB to Cleveland Elementary School, 3121 W. Byron St. “We wanted to give to this community we were going to be a part of,” he said.
He donates at least one installation a year and at other times has worked at cost, as with Lawrence Hall at-risk youth services, and with Taft High School, where fundraising covered materials and cutting. Contractors who had been renovating the school building off the Kennedy Expressway near O’Hare installed it at no charge.
“I am successful in spite of myself,” he said. “If I could be financially independent, it would be a totally different model. I always give away as much positivity as I can. What I have found – and it has taken me different transformative moments — if you give away too much everything suffers and you have nothing left for yourself emotionally and financially. It’s all a balance.” With the move to the new building, he is also cognizant of the need to provide employees both careers and benefits, he said.
He keeps lists of thoughts and ideas, running them through filters to determine the most universal way to say something without being bland and then how it will look when set up. His uses his website, HeyItsMatthew, as a playground for new ideas. His latest message, “We’re All in This Together,” which he placed in the YAB HQ window and then posted on Instagram at the start of the coronavirus shutdown, is simply one he has heard repeated around the world, “a powerful message for this moment.”
For most of the YAB experience, Hoffman was incognito, because he didn’t want the art to be associated with a person.
“Part of me still wishes that was the case. When you see the sticker or an installation, it’s not like, ‘go to this website to learn more.’ When you see this message, there is no background to it. There is nothing you need to do except feel what you need to feel in that moment.”
However, about five years ago, Hoffman had been talking to a business writer, and then attended one of his speeches. The writer talked about pieces Hoffman had done and “accidentally outed” him.
A couple months later, Oprah Winfrey’s people reached out for the SuperSoul Sunday piece. They wanted the focus to be on the artist because it was hard to find information on the works.
“I felt it was important to share so that people know where it comes from, that it is not some weird thing from a corporation,” Hoffman said. “Giving it that context helps more. I might have said no if I hadn’t been accidentally outed, but it seemed like the right time to do it. I always prefer to be behind the scenes, which also goes to my personality.”
A self-described introvert, Hoffman has no inclination to be another Robert Indiana, the creator of the iconic 1970s red/blue/green LOVE sculpture.
“I love the fact that in our studio and store, people [who] come in either are fans and it’s a destination or they just come by it. The number one thing is when they say, ‘I have seen this and it brightened my day and I have no idea what it’s about.’ It’s my favorite thing. I don’t need to be famous, but I do love the idea of this message being spread far and wide: the work being known. Who did it is less important to me.”
[Main Story photos & Captions]
Streetwise-4: StreetWise Vendor Gwendolyn Freeman bikes past the “Anything is Possible” mural at Jewel-Osco, 5516 N. Clark St., just one block north of her regular selling spot in Andersonville. (Kathleen Hinkel photo.)
Matthew+Hoffman+Love+Mural+Chicago+6: “Love” mural at the @properties headquarters (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
Store: The You Are Beautiful store at 3368 N. Elston Ave. in Avondale. (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
What You Do Matters: “What You Do Matters” project for the Chicago Community Trust (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
GASonsie & GASwe are all Equal Matthew Hoffman: “We Are All Equal” shirt and onesie designs for GivAShi*t, available at giveashirt.net, with all proceeds benefiting StreetWise. (photos provided by Jeannine Ringland-Zwirn)
Block 37: “You Are Beautiful” adorns the construction site of Block 37 in 13 languages (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
Oakwood: A large “You Are Beautiful” design welcomes vistors to Oakwood off of South Lake Shore Drive. (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
Morewithlosssheridanstop: “Less is More” on the abandoned Uptown Lounge at Sheridan & Irving Park Road. (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
YABAndersonville: ; “You Are Beautiful” adorns a fence at the parking lot for the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
Englewood: Englewood’s “You Are Beautiful” installation as viewed from Kusanya Cafe (photo provided by Brian Bonanno)
MatthewHoffman: Matthew Hoffman. (Photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com)
Englewoodsetup: The installation of the Englewood project (Brian Bonanno photo)
TAft: Taft High School (photo provided by you-are-beautiful.com.)
SECONDARY ARTICLE
It’s Ok not to be Ok
By Suzanne Hanney
Soon after Matthew Hoffman started the You Are Beautiful project in 2002 with an offer of five free stickers to anyone who sent a stamped, self-addressed envelope, he was astonished to receive letters and photos of stickers on landmarks as far away as China and Antarctica. But it was a letter from Florida that really moved him.
“Someone sent a photograph of a sticker they had put on a bridge railing,” Hoffman said in a telephone interview. “Right below, there was a plaque where someone had taken their life some time before. They put the sticker up and hoped that if someone was in the same position, they might rethink their action. It really struck me how powerful a few words can be. What it did for me was, it reminded me of the significance of everything I do and everything I put out, that I put through the lens: not only that it is open and accepting of everyone but that it will do some good and not add to the negativity. It reinforced my guiding principles.”
Jonny Boucher, meanwhile, grew up just north of Chicago and entered the music scene at age 13 by putting on punk metal shows and creating community spaces where people felt they could belong. When Boucher’s boss and mentor, Mike Scanlan, died of suicide in 2010, he was the ninth person close to Boucher to do so. It was a “final straw moment” that led Boucher to found Hope For The Day (HFTD), a non-profit movement for proactive suicide prevention through outreach and mental health education.
Initially, Boucher would just say a few words onstage after concerts and would encourage people to reach out for help. But the more he did so, the more people came forward, which showed him that breaking the silence empowered people to express their challenges.
Suicide death rates have surged to a 30-year high, with 800,000 reported annually around the world and over 121 individuals daily in the U.S. alone, according to the HFTD website, hftd.org. As CEO of HFTD, Boucher says it’s not a new trend.
“The more we expose it, the more we see like my boss Mike, when he took his life, there was the desire to say it was an ‘accidental death. Oh, we don’t want the family to be plagued by that.’ We haven’t had the best reporting.”
Hope For The Day had developed its own expression, “It’s OK Not to Be OK.” When Boucher and Hoffman exhibited at the same Northwest Side art show, Boucher approached Hoffman, noted their similar work around positive messages, and suggested they work together.
Hoffman’s first project for the collaboration is a 24-foot-wide, cursive “It’s OK Not to Be OK” for Sip of Hope, HFTD’s coffee shop at 3039 W. Fullerton Ave. in Logan Square, where all proceeds go to mental illness education.
“We’ve enjoyed working with Matthew,” Boucher said. “It’s art and it’s words and we know people are impacted differently when they see and read things.”
Since Boucher started HFTD in 2011 at age 24, he took the message “It’s OK Not to Be OK” to the United Kingdom and 20 countries around the world by 2020, even while remaining a very local non-profit in Illinois and the Midwest. HFTD is not a hotline, a mental health service provider or a community center, but it provides free one-hour mental health workshops and its website, www.htfd.org, acts as a compass to affordable mental health services and resources such as food, housing, health care, and more.
“The slogan was part of the origin of it all,” Boucher said. “I broke it down that if all the people I had lost knew that it was OK to talk about it, and OK not to be OK. Mental health is such a big thing, if we could have this conversation internally, and ask for help. It starts with us. We are not going to be able to dismantle bipolar disorder, PTSD,” or that men and women shouldn’t cry in certain situations. “It’s a matter of balance. There are good days and bad days.
“The slogan is really about being there and people being able to respond to it how they need to,” Boucher said. “We’ve set up at festivals all over the world and people will say, ‘Tell me more. This is what I needed to hear.’ It allows them to start that conversation with staff or volunteers. They will say, ‘I came to this concert to get away.’ Or, ‘Give me more. I have a family member or friend who is hurting, who could hear this.’
“To me the return on the investment is that one conversation – we have hundreds – the one person who truly needed it at the time. One conversation can truly save a life and that’s all that matters.”
[Sidebar photo]
Its OK: “It’s OK Not To Be OK” installation surrounded by to-go orders during the COVID-19 crisis at Sip of Hope, 3039 W. Fullerton Ave., in Logan Square.