Here at THE BATON we speak constantly of the importance and necessity of collaboration. Most winter days I think of master collaborator NAU, a luminary Portland-based clothing company, as I wear my favorite cold weather coat to face the elements. NAU’s sustainability practices are almost unmatched and they give 2% of each sale to one of their five Partners for Change, each one an environmental or humanitarian organization, and the consumer chooses to which of the five that percentage will go. We also love the fact that they feature on their website friends who are positively and powerfully impacting the world. One item from their line is matched with each of these individuals and NAU donates 5% of every sale of that item to the charity of that friend’s choice. We think however that our personal no turning back moment was a few years ago at NAU’s pop-up store in Soho where they invited our friend TS McFadden (interviewed on THE BATON on New Year’s Eve 2012) to show his Mother Series — works which are created by removing dried, left over paint from his palettes and remounting and thus repurposing it as works of art in their own right — in their lower level art and performance space. Check out this very nice video of the installation.

www.nau.com, www.tsmcfadden.com