Makin’ Art in the Streets

Residents of Portland Avenue between 15th and 22nd were having a problem with their neighbors dumping trash along the sidewalk and fence directly across from their houses. The litter was becoming yet another eyesore in the West End neighborhood already struggling with keeping up appearances amid abandoned buildings and some of the highest poverty rates in the city.

On the morning that I visited the block in late August, a group of living sculptures lined the fence, surrounded by signs reading “No Dumping” and “Keep Portland Clean” in proud purples and blues. Over the past few months, the area has been cleaned up, reclaimed, and dubbed the BANG! (Beautification, Art, & Neighborhood Growth) Perma-Sculpture Project by a group of local kids and teens, with guidance from artists at the nearby community center Nelligan Hall.

The dumping was a major catalyst for getting the project started, as it prompted a proposal from several of the artists associated with Nelligan Hall to turn the site into a community art installation and garden. After securing support from the Center for Neighborhoods’ PAINT Program, the LVAA’s Open Doors Program, and the Portland Promise Center, fifteen kids from the Portland and Park Hill neighborhoods were brought in to roll up their sleeves and clean up the corridor. Each young artist was given a 2’x4’x2’ raised wooden bed filled with soil and a pile of salvaged objects, and were encouraged to look for patterns occurring in nature and incorporate them into a unique garden bed sculpture. Many of the items that were used in the final designs were collected from the recycling center that is literally a few steps away from the spot where people had been piling garbage.

The artists coined the word “perma-sculpture” to describe the intersection between permaculture and art; the word permaculture being itself a hybrid of permanent + agriculture. Urban permaculture systems are inspired by the give-and-take pattern of the natural world, wherein nothing is wasted and all spent energies get channeled into new resources. This isn’t just a newfangled approach to design, it’s an attitude toward daily life that involves questioning the mechanisms of urban life that create unnecessary waste.

Lindsey Ofcacek was working around the corner at Portland’s Grasshoppers Distribution, a subscription grocery service that aims to provide a link between local famers and consumers, when she offered to lend her green thumb to help with the project. Lindsey was able to explain the concept of sustainable agriculture to the team of artists, and she brought them on a field trip to Breaking New Grounds, a community composting center started by Heine Brothers’ Coffee. Breaking New Grounds is responsible for several of its own neighborhood garden initiatives in the West End, and says on its website that it will compost over 100 tons of food waste from its local coffee shops in 2011.

The group from Portland was able to witness the inspiring vermicompost bins, where earthworms were busy turning used coffee grounds into nutrient-rich compost–thus the Bang! Perma-Sculpture Project’s mascot, “Perm the Worm,” was born.

When I stopped by Grasshoppers Distribution on my way to see the Perma-Sculpture project, I spoke to the managing director, Ellen McGeeney, who told me that she is inspired by the public project, and now wants to beautify the gate in front of her company’s building with baskets of flowers. She also mentioned an initiative that she wants to start at Grasshoppers where they would purchase farmers’ “seconds” and use them to make canned goods or somehow find other ways to put them to use instead of seeing them thrown away. “Seconds,” she explained, are what farmers call slightly damaged goods like bruised tomatoes, or other produce that is still edible but that they aren’t able to sell to the public because they are deemed unsightly or otherwise undesirable.

The artists behind the Bang! Perma-Sculpture Project are using “seconds” to build the installations along Portland Avenue: old guitars, furniture, shoes, buckets, headphones, etc. are painted bright colors and given new lives as robots, mythical creatures, self-portraits, fleurs de lis, Mario Brothers, or abstract gestures.
Before shoving off on the back of his garbage truck that day on Portland Avenue, a city sanitation worker named Demetrius wanted to let me know that he also approved of the project. He said that he thinks using discarded items to create something beautiful for Portland is a good lesson “for the kids.” He’s right of course, except that in the case of the Bang! Perma-Sculpture Project, it’s clearly the kids who are setting the example for everyone else.

– Julie Leidner

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