Portland nonprofit sponsors recycled art project that puts corporate

Unplug the shredder, pull the wood scraps off the recycling pile and start saving the other odds and ends of doing business. The art world and the corporate world don't collide all that often, but the intersection may be more frequent, thanks to a recycled art project that put corporate waste into creative hands.

Sponsored by Cracked Pots, a local nonprofit that aims to reduce the waste stream through creative use, the project provided six local artists with materials that were destined for disposal or recycling along with a small stipend.

It's enough just to be able to dig in some really cool dumpsters, said Steve Cox, a member of the Cracked Pots steering committee. To get paid on top of it is just incredible.

The result was six works as varied as the types of things that got trashed. Metal, wire and other electrical excess from Comcast and Portland General Electric was reborn as sculpture in the hands of artists Gary Logue and Jill Torberson. Artist Michael Torrey took wood waste from Hampton Lumber and put it to work in his sculpture. Larry Peacock's sculptural lamp used to be unusable odds and ends at Rejuvenation. And the paper waste churned out by the attorneys at Jordan Schrader became fiber artist Larissa Brown's wall sculpture.

I see it as just another way to support the arts beyond just buying a block of tickets or making a financial contribution, Cox said.

The collaboration that really stuck with Cox was between the Oregon Ballet Theatre and artist Becca Bernstein. Ballet shoes are an almost $100,000 line item for OBT, and each is only good for eight to 12 hours. The ballet has ways to stretch the use time - and other ways to pass the slippers on - but it's still going through a lot of shoes.

Even an arts organization has waste, Cox said.

In the resulting piece, which was underwritten by U.S. Bank, Bernstein used sketches she'd made at OBT rehearsals as the starting point for a painting and strung the shoes across the canvas.

The works were featured Nov. 4 at the Northwest Business for Culture and the Arts' annual Breakfast of Champions, which honors Portland's top donors to the arts. Showing the works at the breakfast just made sense, said John Mangan, a member of the NWBCA board and executive committee.

The idea of collaboration and actually taking some of their office waste and junk that could actually be given to an artist to use just seemed like the coolest thing, he said.

Pulling in artist Bonnie Meltzer to construct the top donor awards from old motherboards and other computer parts also seemed like a natural for the event, which featured Portland Center Stage artistic director Chris Coleman speaking on how the Portland Armory project is like recycling a space that would have been wasted.

Cox is dreaming big for next year: more artists participating in more partnerships, maybe even a juried show. At the very least, he hopes that seeing the creative collaborations will encourage other NWBCA members to turn over items that have outlived their corporate usefulness.

Even if there's a company out there who can't give $2,500 a year to various arts organizations, they can say, 'Hey, I've got some cool scraps here - come dig through and take what you want,' Cox said.

Mangan also sees the possibilities. In the past, he said, NWBCA has used arts groups to teach diversity and foment creative brainstorming and other activities that underline the business-art connection. The Cracked Pots collaborations, he said, put a visible emphasis on the potential of future mergers.

We just feel there ought to be a seamless partnership between creative people and businesspeople - who are also creative - to try and do more on both sides, he said.

Copyright 2005 Dolan Media Newswires
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.