everydaytrash

  Please excuse the silence of the past couple weeks, it seems that in addition to the preplanned souvenirs I brought back from my most recent trip to Africa, a wee parasite got a ride to New York as well.  It’s been a memorable holiday season, to say the least!  Anyway, anyway, I’m back, recovered, rehydrated and eager to tell you about the adorable cloth bag I bought in Tanzania for a friend.  Makutano is a Tanzanian women’s collective putting out all kinds of fun crafts, including brightly printed cloth totes.  The “one less plastic bag” bags are in response to Tanzania’s outright ban on plastic bags.  For a country with the fraction of the first world’s infrastructure, this is a most impressive move!

Photo via the Makutano Web site.

Sewell Chan at City Room reports that a new show featuring the Department of Sanitation has opened at NYU. This is high on my list of post-hiatus things to do in the city, stay tuned for a report back or let me know if you’ve been already!

Here’s what the NYU Web site has to say about the exihibition:

The DSNY and NYU have collaborated through this project to lay the foundation for the eventual brick-and-mortar DSNY Museum. The exhibition evolved from a course, “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York City Department of Sanitation,” taught by Haidy Geismar, a professor in NYU’s Museum Studies Program and in Anthropology, and Robin Nagle, director of NYU’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program and the DSNY’s anthropologist-in-residence. Nagle’s book, Picking Up, is out next year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

I wonder if any of the students are interested in guest blogging?

Photo via NYU

“An abstract masterpiece by a Mexican artist that was found in the trash by a woman who knew little about modern art has been sold for more than $1 million…“