Hygienic Dress League art project goes public with IPO

The Hygienic Dress League is blurring the lines between business and art with its latest art project, going public.

The Eastern Market-based street-art collective is soliciting 36 investors to purchase stock in the Hygienic Dress League corporation with the idea of eventually going for an initial public offering.

The husband-wife duo behind Hygienic Dress League, Steve and Dorota Coy, launched the organization as a corporation in 2007 so it can be used as a medium of art commenting on advertising with its art installations. They are all public art installations, so there is no gallery or operations or even a consumer product created. New work that will be part of the initial public offering includes "projects inspired by corporate processes such as interactive 1-800 numbers and augmented reality videos broadcast onto billboards," write the Coys in their investor pitch.

"We're trying to do something that has never been done before," says Steve Coy. "It rides the line between serious and satire."

The solicitation of investor money is serious. The Coys will have five Class A shares in Hygienic Dress League. They will sell 100,000 Class B shares as part of the investor solicitation. They are looking for up to 36 investors because that is the maximum allowed by SEC rules. Those shares will be able to sold on the open market when the Hygienic Dress League offers an initial public offering either in a marketplace it has created or a low-barrier stock exchange.

"This is really a big experiment," Steve Coy says. "We don't know how much money we're going to raise."

Don't expect this transaction to be completely 21st century. The Hygienic Dress League will give out gold papered stock certificates. Think of it like a deed to a house. The certificates will be made in the same way they were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for stockholders. These certificates will serve as both legal documents of ownership and pieces of art from the Hygienic Dress League. The Coys like to describe the certificates as their conceptual commentary on art value.

"It gets to the idea of how value can be arbitrarily assigned to art," Steve Coy says.

Check out examples of Hygienic Dress League’s public art installations here, here, and here. For information on investing in Hygienic Dress League, send an email to [email protected].

Source: Steve and Dorota Coy, co-founders of Hygienic Dress League.
Writer: Jon Zemke

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