My guest today is Peter Tunney.
I experienced Peter's work, his astonishing art, long before I experienced the man.
Peter.
Peter is this sort of a legitimate force of nature with boundless creative energy, who loves spreading positive messages in an unconventional way.
After a career in finance and biotech, where for a number of years he was actually Jonas Salk's business partner.
And then nearly a decade defined by wild adventures, photo curating and documenting travels through Africa with photographer and New York society fixture Peter Baird, Tunney returned to New York in 87 and just declared himself an artist out of nowhere.
And he quickly became a central player, artist, and gallerist in the legendary downtown art scene in the eighties and nineties, working with nearly every medium imaginable to create these large scale mantras that have appeared everywhere, from billboards to private collections and his own galleries in Tribeca, as well as Miami's famed Windwood Walls, where I first experienced his work and was blown away by it.
I knew the first time I saw it, I had to know the artist behind the art.
And Tunney, it turns out, is not just a world class liver of life creator and raconteur.
He believes in humankind and the good that results from endless small acts of kindness.
Over the years, Peter's donated countless works to deserving organizations, with his main philanthropic efforts now being criminal justice reform, supporting wrongfully convicted individuals, and ending the stigma of mental illness.
In today's free ranging and story driven conversation, you'll get a powerful sense of the fierce, kinetic and creative energy that drives Peter, and also discover how an accident that nearly ended his life in his early teens set in motion certain events that would shape who he'd become and what he'd awaken to decades down the road.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
You and I have a freakish number of parallel moments.
We're both long island boys of a pretty similar age.
You grew up in Smithtown, I think I grew up in Long island, fell in love with magic at a certain point in our lives, ended up in the world of business, and then had this sort of, like, awakening to the inner artist and kind of like, made a left turn into a world that I think nobody but us saw coming.
I almost used that exact vernacular when I was describing, this is a time where I was being very successful in business, but had also just declared myself an artist.
I had an overlap there about five years.
Really shitty artist, really competent business person.