Inside San Francisco’s 47-acre recycling and recovery center at the dump, where small businesses and residents can bring truckloads of cast-offs, artists have special access to a churning, ever-changing landscape where detritus from all over the city is sorted and processed.

In fact, more than 100 tons of material enter the building every day.

Besides just being the waste management company, Recology’s mission is to conserve resources and reduce waste, inspiring a more mindful relationship with the things we throw away. To that end, we need artists.

Since 1990, Recology has run an Artist-in-Residence program that supports Bay Area artists, giving them freedom to scavenge materials for use in creating artworks.

The four-month residency also provides artists with access to studio space and a stipend. Armed with safety gear and a shopping cart, artists have scavenging privileges in the Public Reuse and Recycling Area to reimagine the discarded waste as art objects.

“The artists love the access,” Recology spokesperson Robert Reed told GNN. “The materials dropped off are varied and interesting.”

The artists, like Neil Mendoza (pictured above), then wheel their carts of reclaimed materials to an art studio/workshop, equipped with tools that Recology maintains at the transfer station.

At the end of each residency, a free-to-the-public exhibition of the artworks created is held in the studio.

On Saturday, the resulting creativity from dozens of Artists In Residence was on full display as 2,000 people attended the opening of a free exhibition featuring 35 years of artwork—a retrospective embodying the phrase ‘trash to treasure’.

While the approaches and themes vary widely among the 63 artists featured, a shared thread runs through it all: the possibilities of transformation through reuse.

For instance, in 2007 Nemo Gould created the Impala sculpture (pictured above, right) by scavenging antlers, a power sander, bandsaw blade wheels, projector flywheel, vacuum cleaner handles, a meat grinder, motorcycle clutch, and cheese slicers.

Over the past 35 years, the Residency program has hosted more than 190 professional artists and 60 student artists from local colleges and universities. These artists, emerging, mid-career, and established, have worked across a wide range of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, performance, and new media.

The gallery exhibit—at 1275 Minnesota Street in San Francisco—runs through Aug. 30, 2025 and is free to the public, according to Recology’s news release here.

“It’s a great, no cost opportunity for families to see art this summer,” says Reed. “We also have a traveling exhibition touring the country.”

BRILLIANT REUSE:
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• City of Berlin Runs a Department Store That Sells All Recycled Goods

The traveling exhibit, which includes Impala, is called Reclaimed: The Art of Recology. It presents a selection of works from 33 fascinating artists who were selected to participate in the company’s unique Residency.

This eclectic exhibition of work includes around 50 objects: from paintings produced with recycled house paint to tapestries made from used ties, shirts, and other fabrics.

From sculptural vases crafted from Ethernet and coaxial cables to ever more hybrid concoctions that are often mind-blowing in execution and form.

The traveling show can be found currently in Traverse City, Michigan at the Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College until Aug. 31, 2025.

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On October 4, it opens in Pueblo, Colorado, showing at the On Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center until Dec. 14, 2025.

There are three shows booked for 2026 in the cities Carlsbad, New Mexico in January; Canton, Ohio in April; and Syracuse University Art Museum in September.

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