TUMBLR

A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...

Jul 23, 2012

“Treasure in the trash.”

About 20 years ago, Nelson Molina, a trash man in NYC, started collecting little bits and pieces of art that he found along his route. He now has a collection of over 1,000 pieces, called The Trash Museum.

The second floor of this garage, long deemed too weak to support vehicles, has become a gallery of sorts, home to hundreds and hundreds of paintings, photographs, posters and objects, neatly framed and mounted on the walls. They are varied in every way — from style to age to material — except for one: almost every last piece of the collection was rescued from household trash by New York City’s sanitation workers as they went along their daily routes.

Over here is a portrait of a grumpy-looking Winston Churchill, and over there, a very nice pastel copy of Henri Matisse’s “Woman With a Hat.” There are photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge; landscapes done in watercolor; ancient tricycles and toy trucks; and four electric guitars, one without pickups, another without strings, arranged around a Michael Jackson poster and gold-sequined tie. There is even a Master of Business Administration diploma from Harvard hanging by a window.

In describing his method, Molina pretty much outlines what I think makes a good blogger:

“Why do I do it?” Mr. Molina asked. “Because I love collecting stuff…”

Though he gets plenty of help digging for garbage gold, it is Mr. Molina, and only Mr. Molina, who decides what is worthy of display, who makes the frames and who puts them up. He has no grand theories about what qualifies, he said, only his gut.

“It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as it’s cool, I can hang it up and I’ve got a place for it.”

(via @abstractsunday)