You Are Enough: Chicago Artist Matthew Hoffman Spreads a Message of Hope Around the World

by Suzanne Hanney

by Suzanne HanneyNewly 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 Street- Wise 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 earlier this year.

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.

Chicago Community Trust

YAB

“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, thenmarketing and communications director for The Trust, told Redeye.

Love mural at @properties

YAB

YAB headquarters

YAB

Hoffman’s latest work is a silver-on-black T-shirt for Giveashi*t to benefit Street- Wise, 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 are all equal T-shirt by Matthew Hoffman

GiveAShi*t

“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.”

Block 37

YAB

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.

The view of the You Are Beautiful installation from Kusanya Café in Engelwood.

Brian Bonanno

Andersonville’s block letter versions of You Are Beautiful are located at:

• The AT&T building fence at Clark and Winona Streets

• The Swedish American Museum parking lot fence at Foster and Ashland Avenues

• The Chiro1 parking lot at Clark Street and Olive Avenue, where its chalkboard paint coating allows people to write messages

“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 cattycorner 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.

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.”

“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. www.streetwise.org 11

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 Super- Soul 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.”