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Meet the NYC Sanitation Department’s resident artist


At first glance, Steal looks fresh from a New York City garbage truck.

Wearing a pair of work boots, cargo pants and a green protective jacket, he reports daily to a bustling garbage truck repair shop in Queens under the Department of Sanitation.

He advises mechanics, welders and painters who work on pick-up trucks, salt spreaders and street sweepers. Then you should look for a pile of trash cans on the street or departmental signs.

On closer inspection, his ensemble is more of a punk rock look than a standard matter, with a trashcan-themed Ramones logo on the back of his vest and a City sticker – denoting the band. thrash metal music, not city agency – on the front.

Even his photo ID is unofficial: Instead of a photo, the “headshot” is a hilarious caricature of Len, 43, who has shaggy hair and oversized glasses.

As the Sanitary Department’s resident artist – and a familiar sight among the elite at outlet depots around the city – Len does not collect trash but the artistic ideas associated with it.

Let it go to New York to hire people to make art about the city’s garbage collectors.

Len’s longstanding position as part of Public Artist in Residence initiativewas created for artists to “address pressing civic challenges through their creative activities” and is run by the Department of Culture.

Cultural program inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in 1977 became involved with the Department of Sanitation as an unpaid artist-in-residence. Apartments currently have a $40,000 payout.

One challenge is getting New Yorkers to “reconsider their own role” in the relationship between themselves, their trash, and the people who make it disappear, according to a Sanitation Department bulletin.

Then there are the roughly 10,000 sanitation workers who make up the largest municipal garbage agency in the United States and who collect and transport more than 24 million pounds of trash and recyclables each day.

The department wants to see its workers treated with more respect: Reports of employees being threatened or assaulted are made about once a month, said spokesman Josh Goodman.

“Our workers are aware that many members of the public do not act like their cleaners are a human being,” he said.

As for Sto Len, the public has adopted an “optimistic, insane” view of their trash.

“You take out your trash bag and it’s gone forever, but where does it go?” he say. “Most people don’t want to know.”

So he tried to create a new division within the department – OK, the office basically included him – called Office of In Visibility. Goal: highlight the workforce.

Photos of Len’s art are posted on the faculty’s website and on his personal page Instagram account. He plans performances at sanitation facilities and conducts public talks and seminars about the residence, which he started in September, and about making art since discarded items.

Len doesn’t rummage through New Yorkers’ trash for his art. Instead, he uses departmental documentation. He remixes footage of the department’s mothballs into collage videos and reassembles old templates for recycling and anti-litter posters to create his own photo collages.

Sto Len, a pseudonym he has long used as his artist name, grew up in Virginia and has lived in New York since 2000. He has focused much of his work on environmental issues, including contaminated water sources and places like the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, recycling waste into art materials and holding gatherings at Superfund locations. Before taking on the New York-based artist position, he did a similar job as an artist-in-residence at a wastewater treatment plant in Virginia.

Len spent the first few months of the Restroom program riding collection trucks, interviewing workers, and following the trail from the curb to the truck to the transfer station, where the trash was loaded onto barges and trains. and shipped out of the city. incineration and burial.

These days, he’s around every day at the department’s Central Repair Workshop in Queens, a mammoth factory where most of the fleet is serviced and where Len, who lives in the county, now has two workshops. .

“Can you imagine a studio space as large as this in New York City,” he said last week, standing in a room where sanitation workers used to make signs reminding New Yorkers , among other things, recycle and clean up after their dogs.

Left behind was a pile of documents including an old silk press, and a rack of samples of signs and posters. Len made the space his own print shop, dusting off old newspapers and tweaking old designs to create “No Dumping” and “Do Not Litter” posters with a sense of irony, fun.

“I wanted to collaborate with the history of the department,” he says of his psychedelic spin on traditional agency imagery. “It is mixing up the visual language of hygiene.”

He tagged to change the name of the department to Department of Sanity because, he said, “if we don’t have someone to clean, the city will really go crazy.”

On the sixth floor of the repair shop, he entered an old space that was once used to shoot and edit training and promotional videos. Keeping the decor beautifully dated, Len recently revived it as a studio for his newly formed SAN TV – Sanitation Art Network.

With the help of Henry Ferrante, a veteran of the department, he used antique video equipment to search for video and shot historical footage that had been stored for decades and then digitized it for future use. used in my installation videos.

Len has also worked with the department’s archivist, Maggie Lee, to collect old materials such as trash cans on the street, and befriends mechanics, painters, and welders who can help him out. create sculptures.

“It doesn’t get any more real than this,” he said. “It’s way more fun to hang out in the sanitary world than the art world,”

As he spoke, he passed garbage trucks for repairs and a giant garbage truck on an elevator dwarfing the mechanic below it. He passed a paint shop on the second floor with an old horse-drawn garbage collector on the corner.

At one point, Len greeted a truck mechanic, 60-year-old Eric Ritter, who was guiding a giant tire onto a forklift. The two had met earlier when Mr. Ritter was playing the saxophone in the store during lunchtime.

Len hopes that Mr. Ritter, and some of the other songwriters he works with, will play at one of his art openings or for a video.

“It was great to have him go through the history of the department and discover what we were doing in store,” said Mr. Ritter. “We’re always here very behind-the-scenes – nobody really knows what we’re doing.”

Mr. Ritter mentioned his other hobbies to Len: the challenge of roller skating rinks and chase the speed record on land in the salt flats of Utah.

“There’s a lot of interesting stories here,” Len said, walking away. “In that way, the cleaning is weird and special.”

For Len, scavenging is a natural subject to making art.

“The problem with the trash is, everyone is connected to it,” he said. “Hopefully I can get people to take a closer look at the things they intentionally overlook.”





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