Art Class, By Charles Mosby

I’m so pleased to include Phyllis’s piece on her work with incarcerated individuals, teaching them about positivity, responsibility, and creative self-expression through the vehicle of art. Through her belief in and expectations for her students, she creates a space of excellence and invites them into it. I would imagine for many of her students, this is a brand new experience that opens their eyes and hearts to what is possible in their lives. The beautiful future we want to create isn’t just for people who already have it all together. The work Phyllis does gives us a model for how we can go about widening the circle of acceptance and hope for everyone. -editor

Following my education, I began teaching art in various traditional venues. I was never quite satisfied, or enthusiastic, about any of them until I took a job teaching painting and drawing in Oklahoma State prisons to men and women incarcerated in medium and maximum-security facilities. That clicked. That was where my heart found its home, and that is the population I’ve been working with ever since, for the last twenty-five years.

“Art Teacher” didn’t seem the right job description after a few weeks of working behind bars. Some of the men and women had already created strikingly fresh work without benefit of an art program or decent materials.

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Chris Jordan’s photographic gallery, Running the Numbers, shows in startling detail what American consumerism looks like. From Jordan’s site:

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

These photographs are mind-blowing for several reasons…

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I am a pianist, music teacher, photographer, and writer. But of all the mediums of communication, music for me is the most authentic and natural.  Music at its best is arguably humankind’s most potent conveyor of transcendent beauty. When you hear truly beautiful music, it dissolves all boundaries between self and other, self and world It is ephemeral and yet utterly real. I recently found a quote from the great Russian writer, Feodor Dostoevsky. He said, “Beauty will save the world.”  I humbly submit that as the context for this blog post and others to come.

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With life and the world around us changing faster and faster, something is stirring in us individually and in the collective, both conscious and unconscious. The very planet we are living on and the things we are inventing on it are changing rapidly and might do so beyond recognition. There isn’t a lot we can or have to take for granted. It is challenging to get one’s head around that, to make room for that much complexity, uncertainty and change.

This in an invitation to invent our future in writing, to participate in creating a vision, through a story, together. To let ourselves go and go for it. Stories are powerful, and often reality will arise out of our imagination as much as reality is shaping it, and if those stories arise out of a collective, they will carry even more power and conviction.

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In a previous life, I made and sold handbags crafted out of old album covers. It was a lot of fun—I loved trolling flea markets and thrift shops and the best record store in the world for the grooviest covers. I also got to use crazy ribbons and cords and different beautiful papers—everything from Chinese newspapers to the sleeves of the records themselves, if they looked cool enough. Punching holes, affixing grommets, and gluing on trim were all very meditative activities, and besides being a good time, I also got paid. I even sold Liberace bags at the Liberace museum!

After a few years, I got burnt out on it—how many Madonna purses can one girl make?—but I still adore making new stuff out of old stuff, and I love trolling indie-crafting mega-site Etsy to see what other crafty kids are making out of old junk. Seeing all the ingenious creations out there makes me happy, because there’s a lot of good stuff in the trash. Add a bit of creative brilliance and elbow grease, and you end up with some insanely wonderful items.

Today I’d like to share some of my favorite things made out of other things, via Etsy. What are some of your favorites?

A necklace made out of an old album!

A notebook made out of 3 1/2” floppys!

Earrings made out of old Lite Brite pieces!

More earrings, made out of Nintendo NES cartridges!

Cufflinks made out of old payphone keys!

Baby booties made out of Ramen noodle packaging!

Underwear made out of an old Chicago Bulls t-shirt!

Windchimes made out of dollheads and lots of other awesomely creepy stuff!

Searching Etsy with the word “recycled” brings back almost 2000 pages of results, so I’m gonna stop there before I blow out our webhost and my credit card. Have you seen any junk transformed into artwork lately? Let us know in the comments ...