please, will you draw me a toad?
Draw your toad, give it a bit of mud and send it to us!
Hundreds of really ugly really beautiful toads, frogs, various characters and intruders
will come together to create one huge installation, on display
from 1 December 2026 at GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino,
and then sold at the charity auction on 12 December 2026.
By tradition and collective imagination, the toad evokes repulsion and ugliness.
What’s more, amphibians are the most endangered vertebrates in Italy: 40% of species are at risk - just think, the golden toad, which disappeared in 1989, is the local and global symbol
of habitat and biodiversity loss! - Art can give social, emotional and environmental value back to the outcast: that’s why we chose the toad as the star of this edition!
The project
All grown-ups were once children – although few of them remember it.*
And to rediscover the child within each of us,
we asked
everyone a simple question: please, will you draw me a
toad?
Che bèeèello! is an open call dedicated to drawing and sharing.
This edition is dedicated to the toad, forever left out
for looking “ugly and different”.
What if the time had come to look at it with new eyes and put it on show?
Che bèeèello! is a call open to everyone, to create a single, ever-evolving
collective installation,
able to celebrate the stylistic and conceptual uniqueness of every author.
Despite the multitude of individual toads – or rather, precisely because of it! – they will form
one big pond where every toad is the black sheep!
By tradition and collective imagination, the toad evokes repulsion and neglect.
Art can give social, emotional and environmental value back to the outcast:
that’s why we chose the toad as the star of this edition.
And precisely because it will be a unique work of art, it will be displayed somewhere special:
on the walls of the Educational Area at GAM in Turin.
Anyone with a toad to draw can take part, no limits: grown-ups and children,
Italians and foreigners, authors, illustrators, dreamers, naturalists, curious minds…
Bèeèautiful, right?
* That’s what the Little Prince thought, and it’s true.
