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Art From Detritus

It's the dawn of a new decade!

The economy is in trouble & we still have too much garbage!

Your art could be part of the solution!!!

If you make art from things that would have been thrown away - broken stuff, old stuff, burned stuff, torn stuff transformed into art- 2D & 3D in any media rescued from trash, your art is eligible.

It's happening again! The exhibit “Art of Detritus: Recycling with Imagination" features fine art from cast-off materials created by professional artists from throughout the country. The heart of this exhibit is the message of the three R's: Reduce/Reuse/Recycle.

The 2010 Art From Detritus Exhibition is a juried international art competition for dynamic, inventive and provocative work created from a multitude of materials that would have been discarded if not rescued for artmaking. The exhibit will occur in spring 2010 at PureLight Gallery located in a recycled building in Turner's Falls, Massachusetts.

This show will be curated by Vernita Nemec, artist/curator, former director of Artists Talk On Art & Viridian Artists in New York City and currently on the Board of Directors of Soho20 in Chelsea NYC. She conceived the first Detritus Exhibition in 1993 & over the years has received funding from The Puffin Foundation, the Kaufmann Foundation and the National Recycling Coalition. Since then, there have been more than a dozen Detritus exhibitions through out the U.S. You can see past Detritus shows by clicking on one of the listings at the left.

Submit your best work now!

Email 3-6 jpegs of work no larger than 500 dpi in either direction. Include in your email an Artwork List with size, materials used, title & date, plus an artist bio & statement.

Submit by April 15, 2010 to: ncognita@earthfire.org

There is no submission fee, but accepted artists will be asked to pay a hanging fee.

Art from Detritus is an exhibit of art to save the planet. How dare I make such a potentially pretentious statement?

My humble answer is that the art shown in these exhibits is made from the stuff we usually throw away or toss on the street without thinking.

Frankly, detritus is just a fancy word for trash. It's all just art from trash.

It's both the beautiful found objects we salvage & those unexpectedly interesting bits of trash that inspire us to recycle (paste, tear, paint and assemble) into something priceless and yet so valuable that we frame it carefully to display proudly on our walls.

And so, these artists are recycling in the biggest sense of that word through their creative approach of using trash, garbage and found objects to make their art. They each are helping to save the planet and perhaps, their efforts will encourage you to think of ways we can leave the earth intact and filled with natural resources for generations to come.

To date there have been 11 exhibits of Art from Detritus (See AFD's vita & history) since 1994.

Take some time to check out the works from 2002, 2003, & 2004 below (images from shows from 2005, 2006, and 2007 are in the works). Don't hesitate to contact me if you'd like the show brought to your community, are interested in possessing one of the artworks (almost all are for sale) or just want to let me know your reaction.

And if you are an artist who makes art from trash, please send your slides along with a bio and sase, and perhaps you will be invited to participate in the next Art from Detritus show. Send them by snail mail to me at Bx 1149, NY NY 10013.

Vernita Nemec aka N'Cognita

Artist & curator

Like a bird might collect

Like a bird might collect

shining things for its nest,

I save the detritus of my daily life.

Stuff that is no longer

Useful or of value --

if it ever was.

I see in it a kind of beauty

& want to try

to transform

the lowly into art.

So I fill my space

with collected fragments.

I save envelopes with pretty patterns

broken goblets and dead roses

thinking they hold a story

& if re-arranged & put back

together, will have some strange

indecipherable meaning.

n'cognita, 2002

Click here to look at the Art from Detritus Show that I curated in 2004 at Synagogue for the Arts in New York City.

Click here to look at the 2003 Art from Detritus Show, held at John Jay College.

Click here to look at the 2002 show, also at John Jay College. A review of the show appeared in the summer 2002 issue of Gallery & Studio available free at most NYC galleries. Click here to see the review. Catalogs from 1994, 1995 & 1996 are still available for $10 including shipping & handling. Send a check to Art from Detritus Bx 1149, NY NY 10013.

If you are interested in purchasing an artwork from any of the shows, please contact me by emailing ncognita@earthfire.org

or email me through the "contact" icon above. I'll let you know which artworks are still available & give you the necessary information for purchasing.

Special thanks to L. Brandon Krall who created the Detritus pages.

Vernita N'Cognita