This Week’s NYT Magazine Profiles Brazilian Artist Vik Muniz
I first learned about Vik Muniz, the highly successful New York-based Brazilian artist, when I saw Waste Land, the documentary about Muniz that won the Public Award in the Sundance Independent Film Festival and shows his work with garbage pickers in Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill of Rio de Janeiro….
From the website for Waste Land:
“Vik Muniz was born into a working-class family in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1961. As a young man he was shot in the leg whilst trying to break up a fight. He received compensation for his injuries and used this money to fund a trip to New York City, where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s.”
“Often working in series, Vik has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history.”
Trailer For Waste Land, Documentary About Vik Muniz
Filmed over three years, Lucy Walker's "Waste Land" follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his home country of Brazil, and to Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest garbage dump located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There Muniz photographs an eclectic band of catadores - pickers of recyclable materials - and then works with them to "paint" their portraits using garbage. The resulting collaboration is a powerful and moving story of people, art and the human spirit.
From KQED:
“An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people, known as catadores, live in Jardim Gramacho dump, while 15,000 derive their income from activities related to it. Some Gramacho residents come from families who have been working there for three generations. Muniz was surprised to meet the community of people who scavenge the refuse of Rio to make a living.”
And then today I saw THIS picture in NYT Magazine…
Artist Vik Muniz Creates Art from Thousands of Paper Cranes
From the NYT Article:
“One July afternoon, a truck full of paper cranes arrived at the Brooklyn studio of Vik Muniz, a Brazilian-born artist known for building images from unconventional materials like diamonds, spaghetti and dust. “I was like, ‘Where are you going to put all these?’” he says. The birds had traveled a long way. After the Japanese earthquake in March, the nonprofit Bezos Family Foundationinvited children to mail origami cranes to the Seattle headquarters of its Students Rebuild program. Each would trigger a $2 donation, up to $200,000. The group received more than 2 million and doubled the donation. Last week, Muniz made a mosaic of a giant crane from smaller ones, for a fund-raising poster. “It’s alchemic,” he said. “The idea worked because everyone wanted to help.”
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