How Materials for the Arts saves discarded objects in New York

Winding through Materials for the Arts’ 35,000-square-foot home is as close as visiting Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. At the beginning of the year, the sprawling warehouse in Queens was filled with Christmas decorations, ornaments, pink evergreens, and lavish soap boxes, along with paper and books, envelopes, archival photos, all kinds of fabric, buttons, beads. , and cut There are also hospital lab coats, Javits Center furniture and vintage typewriters and computer towers, CDs and file folders. Filled with the outcasts of contemporary New York City life waiting to be brought out of the darkness, the list goes on. Most of these items are in perfect condition, and all are meticulously organized and labeled.

It’s also available for free to public school students and teachers, as well as arts nonprofits.

As New York’s largest creative reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects an unlimited supply of reusable materials from businesses and individuals, which are then made available to nonprofits, schools and other city agencies. Diverting around 1.7 million kilos of material from landfills in 2023.

This £1.7 million is nearly four times the amount of material donated just three years ago, and today the nearly 50-year-old organization is poised to continue expanding as it continues to change and evolve to meet ongoing needs. a city without resources, but always without resources.

“It’s not just about our organization, it’s about our city,” said MFTA Executive Director Tara Sansone. ARTnews. “As New York grows, so must our programs, as our mission remains central to the essence of New York itself.”

In January, backed by $50,000 grants from Southwest Airlines and Sony Corporation of America, MFTA launched an awareness campaign to strengthen its character and ultimately bring more buyers, as the organization calls it, through its doors through artist and designer residencies. , field trips and volunteer programs, and numerous educational and public programs that serve more than 6,000 students and 1,000 teachers annually. (It also unveiled a new brand courtesy of the famous design firm Pentagram, with its new yellow-taxi identity splashed across Times Square).

The organization’s future is, in many ways, a long way from its poor beginnings. In 1978, Angela Fremont, then an enterprising young artist working in the Department of Cultural Affairs, learned that the Central Park Zoo urgently needed a refrigerator to store animal medication. He reached out to a local radio show for help and, following an on-air plea, was quickly inundated with responses, prompting him to apply, more broadly, the same principle of making one’s trash one man’s treasure.

“I became interested in the amount of waste the city produced,” Fremont told him New York Times In 1981, “and he knew that artists could use it, because they often lack money for the materials they need.”

The first donation Fremont received for what would become Materials for the Arts was a 50-glass display case from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which continues to donate materials to the MFTA to this day, including a large cache of recently digitized slides. It has since granted membership through an application process to local nonprofit groups with at least two years of arts programming, in addition to public schools and government agencies.

While some items are always in stock (paper, chairs, candles and fashion industry supplies like zippers, thread, sewing machines and dress forms), “it’s the only things that really make it interesting,” Sanson said. “We never know what we’re going to walk into.”

Last year, after Broadway’s longest-running show closed, the MFTA received donations of costumes and sets. The Phantom of the Opera. On the day we spoke, an anonymous donor provided 20 exquisite banquets custom-made for an event; Sansone was already making a mental Rolodex of arts organizations that might benefit.

MFTA has seen consistent and rapid growth, Sanson said, in part because of the corporate focus on sustainability. Luxury brands like Coach have donated raw materials such as discarded leather, Kate Spade has given away palettes of bags and Burberry once donated eight-foot tall animal sculptures from its West Palm Beach store; some of them found a home in Staten Island. the zoo

In 2022, while cultural institutions were still recovering, a single donation of 11,000 dance shoes, from taps to ballet flats, launched Sansone’s Great Dance Shoe Giveaway, where dancers of all ages had to stop by the warehouse for a new one. couple of kicks “The teachers here were crying because most of their students said they had never put on dancing shoes before,” she recalled.

Recently, MFTA has expanded its recycling efforts to include the city’s film and television industries, and has added two staff positions in acquiring these materials. Costumes The wonderful lady Maisel, Little girland Only murders in the building They are among the 1 million pounds of materials the agency has received from productions shot in New York since 2019. The suit worn Inheritance recently went to someone who wore it for job interviews.

While serving schools and arts nonprofits had long been its main focus, Covid marked a turning point that expanded MFTA’s remit. During the pandemic, the program began to hear from beyond its regular membership base: groups making cloth masks for residents, mutual aid groups and social justice groups in need of supplies.

“We had to redefine art and culture in New York City to support artists and open our doors wider to accommodate New Yorkers in need,” Sanson said. That meant supplying fabric for face masks, donating furniture to hospitals, and donating resources to social justice groups fueled by the protests. “Why wouldn’t we donate to Queer Black Lives Matter and donate materials to make costumes or vinyl to make banners when we had it here in storage,” he added.

MFTA then lifted its membership criteria, eliminating the requirement for two years of artistic programming and allowing nonprofits to show only evidence of current programming: “A small LGBTQ organization was doing park readings to promote literacy—that was an application like me, how .don’t we give them membership?” said Samson.

What MFTA collects also benefits New Yorkers who don’t use these assets creatively, clothing and supplies to the city’s Administration for Children and Homeless Services and newly arrived asylum seekers in coordination with city partners and community groups.

“I know we’re not supposed to be political because we’re a municipal government, but I feel like there’s activism in what we do,” Sanson said. “I can’t help but feel that way every day because of the impact we make on people’s lives.”

Although other similar reuse programs exist, MFTA is unique in its large-scale city-sponsored operations, and other municipalities are looking to this example now in its fifth decade. “If there were Art Supplies in every big city,” said Samson, “the world would be a much better and greener place, and artists and students would be much happier.”

Of course, as Sanson admits, the city’s budgets have cuts from time to time, but he is confident in the pride the Department of Culture takes in the program: “We make New Yorkers very happy, we offset the budgets and we help people achieve things. that they couldn’t necessarily afford it. I don’t think that would ever disappear, and if it did, I’d be afraid of the number of people who would come out to protest in the City Hall.”

Since 2012, MFTA has also run an artist-in-residence program, alumni of which include Sui Park, Michael Kelly Williams, and Jean Shin. Sanson said he hopes to grow the residency program and add more studios and create state-of-the-art education spaces, and a larger warehouse could also be in the works.

“The more we take, the more we can give,” he said.

In a studio outside the warehouse, artist Woomin Kim created a lively set of recently discovered fabric panels during her stay, on view through May 3. “I was putting fabric in this giant Ikea plastic bag,” Kim recalled of her first visit. A few months ago to the MFTA warehouse. “‘Is this entire repository available to create a project?’ It seemed like a utopian place.’

The constant change at MFTA reflects the cadence of New York life and has served as a source of artistic inspiration for Kim, she said, recalling being fascinated by the horses during her few days at the warehouse. .

“New York is full of objects and people, but here you really, physically, take a look at the number of things that come in and people immediately take in,” Kim said. “People are consuming and throwing away in this city all the time. This organization feels very New York, you feel the energy of the city.’