History

Where this comes from: Marisol Vengas, my three Curio Cards, Series 9 and 10, and how the pieces got made then versus now.

About Marisol Vengas

I'm Max Infeld. Marisol Vengas is the name I make art under, out of San Francisco and Chico. It started as a social practice from 2007 to 2016: groups of people found pictures, cropped them, colored them and tried layouts, and I put the final pieces together.

marisolvengas.com has the later work too: Series 7 (2021), Series 8 (2025), vintage pieces and MARISOLxNATOSHI.

marisolvengas.com ↗ maxi.grok.me ↗

Curio Cards

Curio Cards is an online art show on Ethereum that opened on May 9, 2017. There are 30 numbered cards by seven artists, about 29,700 cards in all, and no more can be made. Cards 27, 28 and 29 are mine, as Marisol Vengas. All three went up on Ethereum on August 15, 2017.

On October 1, 2021, Christie's sold a full set (30 cards plus the 17b misprint) for 393 ETH, about $1,267,320. It was the first time Christie's took live bids in Ether.

The OpenSea links are the Curio Cards wrapper on Ethereum (contract 0x73DA…f313, the same contract named in the Christie's lot). Card art from each card's IPFS metadata.

Curio Cards docs ↗ curio.cards ↗ Christie's lot ↗

Series 9 and Series 10

Both series are in one collection of 888 on Robinhood Chain (contract 0x941d…3495). Each piece is one of one. The royalty is 7.5%.

Series 9 Nos. 1–100 · token ids 30–129 · made and minted by me first
Physical print Nos. 1–12 only · also an 18 × 24 in print
Series 10 No. 101 and up · token id 130 and up · public blind mints

Series 9 is up at the Gallery Art Show.

artshow.grok.me ↗ See every piece in the gallery

How they were made then (2007–2017)

A group of us found pictures of buildings, plants and figures.
They cropped them, adjusted color and shade, and tried layouts.
The buildings were printed in black toner on neon cardstock. People colored the shapes.
Plants and figures were printed on clear transparency film and laid on top. Trial layouts were clipped together.
I picked from these studies, fixed them up, and glued the final piece onto foam core.
The edges were finished with metallic tape. Each piece got a tag with its title, price and number, and "Marisol Vengas 6th Edition".
Photos of the physical pieces became Curio Cards 27, 28 and 29.

Yellow 29, the physical original: building on yellow cardstock with a plant overlay and metallic tape edges — Yellow 29, front and back. Made and shown in 2012 as "Beica", No. 33, $20. About 10 × 8 cm. Photos from marisolvengas.com.

The back of Yellow 29: its Curio Card label and the Marisol Vengas 6th Edition tag, title Beica, price $20, number 33 — Yellow 29, front and back. Made and shown in 2012 as "Beica", No. 33, $20. About 10 × 8 cm. Photos from marisolvengas.com.

How they are made now (Series 10)

1. Pick a rough. The mint page shows 12 roughs. Each is a flat drawing made by code from its own seed: a building, windows, a plant, clouds and a frame. They're held for you while the page is open.
2. Choose the windows. Pick one of five window colors and which way the gradient runs. Then keep the same mix in every window or mix it up. You can tap one window to give it its own color. The background follows on its own.
3. Check the preview. The preview updates as you go. Only the window colors can change.
4. Mint. Connect a wallet (MetaMask, Robinhood Wallet, or WalletConnect). We hold that rough for your wallet and sign it. Your wallet sends one transaction of 0.01 ETH on Robinhood Chain. The contract won't mint the same rough twice.
5. Blind until the reveal. Right after you mint, your token shows the rough. The final art comes next.

6. The worker sees the mint. A separate render machine watches the chain and picks up the new token.

7. Drawing. It redraws the rough at full size from the same seed and your choices.

8. Photoreal pass. Venice AI repaints the building and the clouds using the rough as a guide. The plant stays the solid black shape from the drawing. A quality check compares the result with the plan.

9. Upscale. Real-ESRGAN enlarges the image on the machine's CPU to print size, 5400 × 7200 px.

10. Print PDF. It makes an 18 × 24 in print PDF at 300 ppi.

11. Pin. The image, the PDF and the metadata are pinned to IPFS with Pinata.

12. Reveal. The worker sets the token's metadata on chain to the IPFS link. Marketplaces get an update event.

13. Preview. A 1200 px WebP copy goes to Cloudflare R2 so the site loads fast. The full image stays on IPFS.

For No. 102 this took about 8 minutes from mint to reveal, and the AI part cost $0.50.
14. The token page. The final art, its caption, the print PDF and a View on OpenSea button.
15. The gallery. Every minted piece in order. The Blind mints filter shows only Series 10. Each piece also links to OpenSea.

Choices we made

Robinhood Chain: Gas is paid in ETH and costs very little: a mint used about 0.0000025 ETH in gas. OpenSea lists the chain. People with Robinhood Wallet can mint from their phone.
Blind mint: You pick from 12 roughs and set the windows. The final art gets made after the mint, so nobody sees it before it's minted.
Buttons that match the render: The window color buttons and the render use one shared list of colors, so what you pick is what gets drawn.
A $10 a day AI limit: Paid AI calls stop at $10 a day (by UTC day). After that, mints still go through and get the free render without the AI pass.
R2 previews: The site shows a small WebP copy from Cloudflare R2, so pages load fast. The full-size image and the print stay on IPFS.
Plain words: Short sentences that say what each step does.
Series 9 and Series 10: I made and minted the first 100 (Series 9) myself, so there was always finished work to look at and share. Only Nos. 1–12 have a physical print. Everything from No. 101 on is a public blind mint (Series 10).