Jenny Murphy specializes in found art and recently received her BFA from Washington University. She previously interned at the Pulitzer, collecting lamps for The Light Project, and is now collecting garbage for Garbage Wall, a piece in the upcoming exhibition Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Amy Broadway: Jenny, you have been deemed “Garbage Specialist” in our Community Engagement Department and will lead the gathering of refuse for Garbage Wall, a re-creation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970 Garbage Wall. The wall will be 72″x72″x18″. How do you plan to get all that trash?

Jenny Murphy: We’re collecting garbage from a few different angles. Since we want the items that go into the wall to reflect the St. Louis community, we’re trying to get different groups of people around the city interested in the project. We’ve asked local schools for student contributions and organized neighborhood clean-ups with Big Brothers Big Sisters and Washington University Undergrads. It’s a strange request to ask people for their trash, but once people learn about Gordon Matta-Clark and see the sample garbage wall, people are intrigued by the idea of transforming garbage into a functional and artistic structure.

To make sure we have enough garbage, I’m also traveling around the city collecting discarded items from thrift stores and picking up residential bulk trash that’s left on the curbs in front of houses.

AB: Aside from garbage collecting, what other programs will be connected with Garbage Wall, and what are the goals of those programs?

JM: As we begin to visit the schools, we’re discussing the ideas behind Gordon Matta-Clark’s work.We talk with the students about the idea of addressing social issues through art and design, since originally Matta-Clark built the first walls as a response to the structures–often cardboard–that he saw homeless people using as shelter. On top of that we’re trying to get across the idea of the transformative power of art, how Matta-Clark could alter the way we look at trash and embed these objects with new meaning and function.

We hope that discussing these ideas with the students will spark their interest in the exhibition and inspire them to create their own artwork. I’ll continue to visit the schools and brainstorm with the students ways they could build their own structures out of discarded items.

AB: On September 26, at the Green Homes Festival, you will man a booth representing the Pulitzer. What activities will you have at the booth, and how will they relate to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark?

At the Green Homes Festival, we’ll have recycled art projects all involving creative ways to reuse newspaper. You can make a new handmade piece of paper, a paper kite, or a seed starting pot! We want to have projects that illustrate different ways you can transform one material that is very abundant and commonly discarded (hopefully recycled!). We’ll also have the “mock wall” at the festival, which is a large Plexiglas box where people can try their hand at building with garbage. We’ll have rubber gloves and people will be able to select from our tubs of garbage to build up the wall. If anyone wants to bring a trash donation, they are welcome to. It should be a common household item that is inorganic (no food waste please) and no larger than 12″ x 12″.