Dumpster Treasures:
From Discard to Trashterpiece
Reimagining Campus Move Out Waste
March 21st, 2PM - 6PM
Sustainable Future Center - Knoxville, TN
Dumpster Treasures: From Discard to Trashterpiece is an art and research project built in direct opposition to throwaway culture.
Discard to Trashterpiece features art and performance by Keith Bryant, Jasmine Flowers, Amira Mahdi, Talia Marshall, Mayson Messoria, Lauren Mohundro, Lindsay Skvarek, Chante Thomas, and Hannah Trammell.
Our goal is to make waste visible again. We live in a system that teaches us to buy, accumulate, and discard without seeing the consequences. It hides extraction, labor, and waste behind convenience. It trains us to believe trash goes “away.” This exhibit, which is made from reclaimed items, rejects that lie.
During campus move-out, usable items are discarded in staggering volumes – furniture, clothing, appliances, supplies, and unopened goods – all treated as worthless the moment they become inconvenient. Dumpster Treasures interrupts that cycle. We recover, sort, document, and transform what has been thrown away, asking a simple question with radical implications: Would someone still use this? If the answer is yes, then the problem is not the object. It is the system that discarded it.
This is not about making trash look pretty or performing shallow sustainability. It is about making waste visible, exposing the violence of disposability, and confronting the economic and ecological logic that normalizes excess alongside need.
Part salvage effort, part archive, part art intervention, Dumpster Treasures turns discarded objects into public witness.
There is no “away.” There is only Earth.
