Residents and businesses in the Portland area generate about 2.6 million tons of waste each year – enough to fill the Rose Garden arena 15 times over. The region's recycling and composting programs help reduce the amount of waste that heads to the landfill, but there are still items that are not or cannot be recycled, at least until now. Metro, in cooperation with Recology, an employee-owned company that manages resource recovery facilities and Metro’s Central garbage and recycling transfer station, and crackedpots, a local environmental arts nonprofit organization, is launching the second year of a program that makes art out of trash.
A call to artists is going out for GLEAN, formerly known as the Pacific Northwest Art Program. The endeavor helps promote new ways of thinking about conserving resources, art and the environment. The juried program will feature five artists from the tri-county region, each of whom will receive a $2,000 stipend and scavenging privileges for six months to discarded materials dropped off at Metro Central Transfer Station in Northwest Portland. A two-week public showing and sale of the artwork is scheduled for mid-September at a local art gallery.
GLEAN is modeled after Recology's Artist in Residence program in San Francisco. Since its founding 20 years ago, the San Francisco program has supported more than 100 professional and student artists in the Bay Area, and has been the subject of national and international press.