Why put an art center next to the world’s highest mountain? As George Mallory might say, because it’s there.
Artnet News is reporting on an initiative to try some very artistic upcycling on the world’s highest mountain.
Mount Everest, also known as Sagarmatha, has been the site of some legendary mountain climbing, but also a growing environmental problem.
For decades, expeditions have left a lot of waste and refuse on the mountain, everything from empty oxygen tanks to plastic bottles to, um, well, there are no bathrooms up there.
The good news is that some people in the climbing community have been trying to clean up.
There have even been entire expeditions aimed at removing garbage and recyclables so that we don’t have to rename the peak Mount Trashmore.
But garbage pickup at high altitude is slow work, so there’s a new initiative called Sagarmatha Next to level this process up.
One of their ideas is to create the Sagarmatha Next Center near the mountain.
It would hire artisans to turn old items brought back down from Everest into new pieces of art, which could be sold to tourists and fund even more cleanup.
The hope is that this and other future projects will turn the process of cleaning up some seven decades of mountaineering history into less of an uphill struggle.
Black History Month is underway, and so we wanted to make sure you knew about the Black Art Library.
Its founder, Asmaa Walton, began filling in the gaps in art history by collecting books about Black visual artists and posting about them on Instagram.
A year later, there’s an actual library on exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, hundreds of books that fill an entire gallery wall, with more on the way.
Black Art Library is a resource of rare publications highlighting the work of Black artists (It’s Nice That)
Join us as a backer on Patreon and together we’ll make some great art
Mount Everest photo by Esin Üstün via Flickr/Creative Commons