JMS Kaplan Journal by Megan Burks
March 19, 2008

As students paraded into their second grade classroom wearing green T-shirts and headbands supporting bouncing shamrocks, Brian McCormick contemplated putting on the green slipcover from his classroom couch. He had forgotten to wear the color on a day when its meaning was two-fold: not only was it St. Patrick’s Day at Camino Creek Elementary School in Carlsbad, but his students were about to get a lesson in art and the environment.

Instead of filing into their miniature desks and cracking open a science book, the second graders crowded on the floor around McCormick’s now-bare couch and listened to Kara Hwang, the education director at the Lux Art Institute (http://www.luxartinstitute.org/) in Encinitas.

“Where do you get your supplies when you want to make art?” Hwang asked the children.

Hands shot up and bodies lurched forward as kids shouted out common superstores and craft supply places. Hwang then unveiled "Run-off Dolphin" a dolphin-shaped suitcase decorated not with store-bought items but with trash and recyclables found at the beach.

The piece, created by Los Angeles artist Kim Abeles , is part of the Valise Project, which brings museum-quality art with a social message to classrooms throughout San Diego County. Hwang said the project’s aim is to bring art back into the classroom while communicating a broader lesson - in the dolphin case: reduce, reuse and recycle.

“They get a new perspective of what art can be,” Hwang said. “It doesn’t have to be a framed piece that just matches the couch.”

The children inspected the straws, lighters and plastic cutlery adorning the outside of the case and picked trash contained inside the dolphin’s fleshy, satin-lined belly. They began referring to the plastic rings in the dolphin's mouth as the “deadly six-pack rings” when they learned the fabric lining of the piece was meant to mimic a casket for dolphins.

“It reminds kids to be more mindful of the effect they have on their environment - the beach is their environment here in Encinitas,” Hwang said after encouraging the students to cut the plastic rings and forgo straws when they order drinks at restaurants.

Abeles, who sold the piece to the Lux Institute after taking it into her own daughter’s classroom, said in an email interview that art can be influential in starting and continuing a conversation that contributes to the growing green movement.

“Education and dialogue go a long way to make changes in our impact on the environment,” Abeles said. “Look how quickly people responded in individual ways when ‘green’ became part of the international conversation.”

Green Activism Through Smog Art

Abeles, who moved to Los Angeles from Ohio, began her advocacy work for the environment after finding it hard to adjust to the city’s smog. Besides using found objects like recyclables, she is most well known for using smog particles to create her art.

In her “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates,” she left dinner plates with stencils on her roof to collect pollution. The amount of smog she gathered varied with each president’s environmental record. For those presidents with the worst record, she left the plates out longer, making their faces grow darker each day.  Woodrow Wilson’s plate was on the roof for just four days while Presidents Reagan and the George W. Bush each remained there for 40.

Abeles also painted a time-lapse image of the same patch of LA sky, charting its changes in color, which she said ranged from “yellow to pea green,” but rarely blue. And she photographed a view from downtown Los Angeles each day for 14 months to show how long it took for smog to clear, making the mountains finally visible.

Though her art may be more subtle than businesses that publicly tie themselves to the green movement through advertisements and new products, Abeles maintains that art is an important part of awareness and change. Hwang agreed, saying that art can speak to viewers in a way that sticks while words cannot.

“I see my work about the environment as part of a swell,” Abeles said. “Artists and creative thinkers have been working toward this effort for many years and eventually all the individual efforts merged together as an effective message.”

It seems the merging voices have already impacted the young students in Carlsbad. They left class that day as if environmental activism were the impetus for their wardrobes and St. Patrick’s Day an afterthought.

The children were sent home with a mission: collect all the personal trash items they could find and bring them to school the next day to create self portraits. Hwang said she hoped they would take the lesson home and share it with their parents, whose generation she says is usually less open to the green movement.

Both Hwang and Abeles said they wanted the dolphin to empower the students to start a conversation about recycling and to take responsibility for the environment in their own way.

“Change works through individual efforts that very naturally become a collective chorus,” Abeles said.