Art Initiative
The acquisition of art created by Ross Bleckner, Maria Elena Sandovici, and Christian Riso by Colette Mazzucelli for her personal collection leads to the elaboration of the Art Initiative, which is profiled on the LEAD IMPACT Art Institute website.
The art by Ross Bleckner consists of a third of the “Crypto Flares,” which are a super-rare collection of luminous paintings acquired by a community of fewer than a hundred (100) people.
The images are abstract watercolors on paper, hand painted by world-famous, blue-chip artist Ross Bleckner. Each painting was scanned in HD, and minted in Ethereum, before being ceremoniously erased on video. All 100 Crypto Flares are 1/1 utility NFTs: offering owners links to unlock HD images, and video of the artist erasing the source paintings. Bleckner is the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. His paintings are in museums around the world.
The art by Maria Elena Sandovici consists of pieces that depict architecture, landscapes, and nature.
She works primarily in watercolor on paper and acrylic on wood with occasional luscious incursions into oil painting. Balancing figurative and abstract, her works explore her daily experiences and emotions. In 2017, she met internationally acclaimed artist John Ross Palmer and applied to his Escapist Mentorship Program, from which she graduated in 2018. She received the Escapist Alumni Award in 2020.
Over time, the Art Initiative aims to feature pieces by contemporary artists, which support learning through ideas articulated by the late Dr. Maxine Greene in her published works, notably Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2000). Starting in late 2026, select pieces that comprise the Art Initiative may be acquired and/or traded during online auctions organized by LEAD IMPACT to support its various Initiatives.
Christian Riso’s art is an emotional experience filed by years of training and exploration in multiple forms of art. Born to a family of artists; his grandfather was a sculptor, his father a chef-de-cusine, Christian is also an accomplished chef and sculptor. It was in his native Algeria where Jaques Moreau introduced him to seascapes and landscapes and initiated him into two dimensional art as his first teacher. Travel throughout Europe and North America brings diversity & in Southern California, christian studied sculpture under Lois Sloan and then moved on to pottery and jewelry. Years of intense drawing and studying human anatomy & portraits were inevitably to bring Christian to oil painting. He moved to Hawaii. Today, his favorite medium to express himself is oil painting. His colors are vivid and his strokes are suggestions of “old masters” interpreted with the vitality of the natural beauty which surrounds Kauai.