Visual Artists

• Beach Plastic: the project of artists Judith Selby Lang and  Richard Lang who for over ten years have collected plastic trash from the beach at the Point Reyes National sea shore and incorporated it into beautiful works of art to highlight the environmental issues of plastic pollution. Read about my adventure with Judith and Richard.
• Chris Jordan Photographic Arts: Chris Jordan is a photographer whose series Running the Numbers, a comment on society’s mass consumption, has gone viral.  In 2009, he visited the island of Midway to photograph dead albatross chicks full of plastic pieces.  He’s a committed and passionate activist.
• Coastodian: The Coastodian builds giant “meta-bottles” from plastic bottles he collects on the beach.  These meta-bottles show what one person can pick up on a fraction of the earth’s coastline in one short year.
• Dara Herman Zierlein: Painter and political artist whose subject matter revolves around the paradigm of motherhood, the environmental and political issues from the view point of a woman in American society.  See her heartbreaking portrayals of ocean plastic pollution here.
• Dianna Cohen: L.A. artist who paints with plastic bags and other trash to create beautiful abstract pieces that comment on our disposable society. Read Dianna’s profile on My Plastic-free Life here.
• International Plastic Quilt Project: The project asks participants to try living plastic-free for a few months, collect any plastic they can’t avoid, and then turn their collection into a quilt square to raise awareness of plastic’s ubiquity.  Here’s my post about the project with lots of pictures.
• Kathleen Egan: Bay Area surfer who creates mosaics and sculptures from plastic beach trash, notably a giant plastic bottle wave that can be “surfed” by members of the public. Read Kathleen’s profile on My Plastic-free Life.
• Marina DeBris:  L.A. artist Marina DeBris uses humor and irony in her plastic trash pieces to show that the waste we create keeps coming back to haunt us.
• Plastic Footprint Project: Teacher Annie Clark was tired of all the plastic bottles her kids were bringing into her art class and decided to use art to teach them about plastic pollution.  She enlisted her students’ help to build a giant plastic foot made of water bottles standing on Planet Earth. Read my blog post about the project here.
• Plastic Ocean Project: Artist Bonnie Monteleone’s art installation “What Goes Around, Comes Around” consists of plastic items morphed into the famous block art, “The Great Wave” by Hokusai.  It systematically illustrates how the oceans are very different than what Hokusai saw less than 200 years ago.
• Plastiquarium: David Edgar creates strange marine life from recycled plastic detergent bottles.  His piece, Plastiquarium, envisions a plastic world in which marine creatures have evolved into into strange forms mimicking the plastic that pollutes the sea.  Read my interview with David Edgar.
• Susan Scott is a marine biologist living in Hawaii who creates beautiful collages and sculptures from the plastic trash she finds on the beach.  Check out her gorgeous and heartbreaking portraits of albatrosses made from cigarette lighters.
• Tess Felix: Tess creates amazingly detailed portraits from plastic trash she collects near her home at Stinson Beach.  Check out the incredible portraits she created of me and other “ocean heroes.”
• Washed Ashore Project:  The Washed Ashore Project builds large art sculptures of sea life made from plastic marine debris, which are part of a traveling exhibition which includes educational signage and programs that encourage reducing, refusing, reusing and recycling.
• Washed Up: A stunning photo series by Alejandro Durán.  The compositions depict brilliantly-colored plastic objects arranged deliberately against the natural environment to make a statement about plastic pollution.