More garbage as art from around the country

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, at a reststop along the east side of the highway, there is a roadrunner, 20 feet tall and 50 feet long. It is made entirely of garbage. The white stomach is made mostly from old tennis shoes. But vistors also note seeing steering wheels, children’s toys, and office fans incorporated into the sculpture. From what I can discover, on the other side of the country, no one knows who made the sculpture. It just appeared on the desert landscape one day, and has become a staple of Roadside America. 

Norcal Waste Systems,  a landfill outside of San Francisco, has a program where artists compete to live near the dump and have free reign over whatever they find inside. The rules are that they must be established artists, they must make their work entirely from trash from the landfill, and they must allow the group that runs the landfill to show their work for a certain period of time.  

The more I investigate garbage as art, the more I find it exists. And the motivations are so varied. To make people laugh. Because an artist is poor. As an environmental statement. As artist Robert Lederman said, “Garbage is the most abundant ‘natural’ resource.”