Featuring Artists: Lea Craigie-Marshall, Len Harris, Phil Hazard, Bernie Houston, Margery Goldberg, Ronni Jolles, Jan Kirsh, Nancy Nesvet, Carol Newmyer, Larry Ringgold, Ellen Sinel, Lynda Smith-Bugge, Patricia Skinner, Bradley Stevens, Jen Wagner, and Marcie Wolf-Hubbard
Life begins in water and we are poisoning this precious resource with our plastics and pollutants. When will our empathy for the oceans and the beings that live within finally outweigh our greed for convenience? What can we do as individuals to start turning the tides filled with micro plastics to tides of clear water? We can start by giving up straws, single use water bottles, disposable cutlery and plastic bags. My piece for this show “All Choked Up” is a blue whale sculpture created with recycled/repurposed plastic bottles and shopping bags. Visitors will be invited to interact with the art by feeding the whale plastic waste such as straws, bottles and bags. This should evoke a feeling of guilt for all the years of pollution we as humans have subjected earth to and for all the deaths of creatures we have caused. My hope is that patrons will walk away a bit more cognizant of how their actions can turn back the tides.
This is the only planet we have! Please try and clean it up and make a future for our children and grandchildren, not to mention the plants and animals who share our planet, and who have been here a lot longer than we have and done very little damage to the planet. Humans do extreme harm to our environment and to other people. When did we lose the notion of doing unto others as we would like done to ourselves?
Say to yourself today what can I do? Then do it. This is not an existential threat, this is real.
Recycle everything you can possibly recycle. Better yet use things again and again that require no recycling. Pull up your grass and replace it with plants and like my yard, sculpture. I use decorative mulch in between my plants and beautiful rocks. Grass takes too much water, chemicals, and do you know where grass started? England, it’s how the middle class differentiated itself from the poor.
Artists know how to make much out of little, they build things that last not for weeks, years or decades, but centuries and millenniums. Everyday is Earth Day! Our artists celebrate this with their art year-round.
Trees can live very well without people, but people cannot exist without trees. Can you think of anything that has ever lived that is as useful and lives as long after it is dead as the wood from a tree?
Mother Nature is quite angry at us humans these days – you see it every day with weather extremes, floods, tornadoes, and more. This doesn’t even consider the burning of the rain forests; the acts that nations are doing to destroy other nations.
We need to be far more mindful of what we are doing. Money is not the be all to end all, having our planet survive is.
