everydaytrash

Check out this exciting trashie event listing via nonsense nyc, I’ll let you know all about it by the weekend!
The NYC Department of Sanitation and New York University present:

A free illustrated lecture, exhibition tour, and status report on the DSNY museum-in-the-making by Robin Nagle, Ph.D., DSNY Anthropologist-in-Residence, and Haidy Geismar, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology, NYU.

New York City choked on its own trash for much of its early existence. Until Gotham got serious about sanitation, foul-smelling streets, staggering infant mortality rates, and short life expectancies were normal characteristics of city life.

Using newly rediscovered photos from the DSNY’s own collection, Profs. Nagle and Geismar will recount how the Department of Street Cleaning and its successor, the Department of Sanitation, transformed New York from a public health minefield to a safe and sanitary home for millions. They will also describe their recent efforts to create a permanent NYC Department of Sanitation Museum.

The lecture will take place within the ongoing exhibition Loaded Out: Making a Museum. Profs. Nagle and Geismar will conduct a brief tour of the exhibit after their talk. On display are rare historical DSNY images and memorabilia, including a scale replica of a DSNY tugboat and barge, built by sanitation craftsmen in 1952; a sanitation worker’s uniform, customized for the 1939 World’s Fair; a pith helmet worn by one of the White Wings, NYC‘s famous white-uniformed street cleaners of the 1890s; and vintage film footage describing the varied duties of the DSNY in 1950.

136 West 20th Street, second floor, between 6th and 7th avenues, Manhattan
6pm,

Continues SUNDAY, January 13 at 6p
212 998 8065
robin.nagle[at]nyu.edu

Who knew the department of sanitation had an anthropologist in residence?!

On this lovely Monday, a special shout-out goes to Paz for tipping me off to Garbage Worship, which led to a highly entertaining web search and the eventual stumbling upon of this killer trash Web site. There’s no better way to start a week of garblogging than to turn over a rock and discover an entire community of creative trashies! Image from trashworship.net.

  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…“

Check out these inspired, trashy costumes from the NYC Halloween Parade. Here’s a note on the artist from Dorothy:

The artist, Andy Padre, creates Metrocard art for a variety of events each year. Last year’s Halloween parade was a Metrocard wedding party (search flickr for those tags and pictures come up), we were sea creatures in the Mermaid Parade, and he also creates Metrocard Easter bonnets for the Easter Parade. Andy’s work has been featured in Metro newspaper and yesterday on Good Day NY. This year he used over 5000 Metrocards and over 20,000 staples!

In what is becoming a more and more common urban planning move, Tel Aviv is turning a former dump into a park. Interestingly, they aren’t hiding the trashy past of the space, but rather celebrating it in recycling-themed sculptures. Interesting stuff. Thanks for the link, Alina! And thanks to everyone out there for bearing with me through this most recent and most lengthy trash hiatus. I took a couple trashy photos in West Africa, which I hope to share soon but was otherwise preoccupied by the demands of the day job, absorbing the wonders of new cultures and fighting off various parasites. It’s good to be home!

Photo by Isabel Kershner via nytimes.com