Green Art and Environmental Education in Santa Barbara
By Charles Donelan
For more than twenty years, Art From Scrap in Santa Barbara, CA has been leading the way towards a more harmonious environment through the simultaneous promotion of recycling, environmental awareness, and artistic expression.
“Everything is connected. Everything ends up somewhere. We have options. We make choices.”
Construction – mixed media assemblage
Originally formed in 1990 by parents responding to cuts in school budgets for the arts, the organization has since expanded to embrace many roles. Through the Green Schools program, AFS serves more than 12,000 students and teachers each year with in-class lessons and field trips that focus on waste diversion, water quality, and school gardens. At the Art Reuse store, artists can find free materials that have been donated by dozens of businesses and hundreds of individuals, from tiles and tape to paper and picture frames, fabric, containers of all shapes and sizes, beads, and even polyurethane remnants from locally manufactured skateboard wheels. Santa Barbara nurtures a thriving assemblage art scene, and this is due in no small part not only to the materials available through ArtFrom Scrap, but also to the teaching and learning that goes on there.
Gourd – mixed media assemblage
In addition to on-site, artist-led sessions designed to introduce people to assemblage techniques and styles, there are regular curated shows at the AFS Gallery that feature the work of many of the local scene’s luminaries such as Dug Uyesaka, Tony Askew, Anne Luther, Susan Tibbles, Rod Lathim, and Marcelino Jimnenez. AFS Director Cay Sanchez, in addition to being a tireless promoter of the organization and its mission, is also herself a distinguished practitioner of the art of assemblage.
Green40 – mixed media assemblage
For Santa Barbara’s Art From Scrap, the message is simple, and the goal is to live by these words—“Everything is connected. Everything ends up somewhere. We have options. We make choices.”
Contact Art From Scrap at: www.artfromscrap.org
Charles Donelan is Arts Editor at the Santa Barbara Independent and teaches AP English at the Laguna Blanca School. He writes frequently on a wide variety of topics in the arts, and is the author of A Marketable Vice: Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron’s Don Juan (Macmillan).
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