Wicked Monstrous Dialogues: Part III

Wicked Monstrous Dialogues: Part lll

When: Thursday, March 19, 2026 1:00 PM, MDT
Where: ZOOM

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EVENT DETAILS:

WICKED MONSTROUS DIALOGUES: Part lll

Thursday, March 19 Timebuddy

United States: 10am HDT, Noon PDT, 1 MDT, 2pm CST, 3pm EDT

Europe: 19:00 GMT, 20:00 CET, Australia: Friday, March 20, 6:00am AEDT

Christy Rupp

Pamela Longobardi

Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang

This winter/spring we are exploring through a series of dialogues, works that our members are making today that engage plastics as a material for reuse, research, and aesthetic inquiry. Artists invited are included in the upcoming ecoartspace book titled Wicked Monstrous, that will launch fall 2026.

For this third Dialogues, we will hear from Christy Rupp, who will discuss herwork made with single use plastic debris reconstructing planktonic forms, and Pamela Longobardi who will present her ongoing work with the Drifter's Project, which has removed tens of thousands of pounds of waste materials from the natural environment. And Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang, who will share their collaborative practice One Beach Plastic, which they began in 1999. 

Each presenter will have approximately 15 minutes to discuss their work, then Q&A with audience participation following. 

Member presenters:

Christy Rupp is a conceptual artist and citizen scientist, who grew up in Buffalo, New York during the 60's as the city was coping with the crumbling infrastructure of the rust belt, and the declared "death" of Lake Erie. Witnessing this as a teenager gave her an awareness that the language used to define ecocide is highly subjective. Rupp moved to New York City as it faced bankruptcy and offered fertile ground for a generation of artists lucky enough to participate in the petri dish of history, culture and nature that was the late 70’s burgeoning East Village art scene. A lifelong interest in the waste stream and its impact on habitat has since defined her artwork. Recent solo exhibitions include Fairfield University Museum in Connecticut, Anderson Gallery at University of Buffalo, and Interventions at Buffalo Museum of Science, as well as Noisy Autumn, a monograph published by Simon and Schuster in 2021. christyrupp.com

Pamela Longobardi's  parents, an ocean lifeguard and Delaware’s female diving champion, connected her from an early age to water life. After discovering mountains of plastic on remote Hawai’ian shores in 2006, she founded the Drifters Project, centralizing the artist as culture worker/activist/researcher. Now a global collaborative entity, Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situated it as social sculpture. Her multidisciplinary studio-based and collaborative social practice ranges from paintings, collage, photography, large-scale sculpture, installation, public actions, and performance.  Winner of the prestigious Hudgens Prize, Longobardi was featured in National Geographic, SIERRA magazine, Weather Channel, multiple films and in exhibitions around the world.  As Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature and Naturalist she co-leads expeditions to remote locations around the world. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is Regent’s Professor at Georgia State University.  A 15+ year survey of her work ‘Ocean Gleaning’ was shown at the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida in 2022 with a book published by Fall Line Press. pamlongobardi.com

Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang have collaborated as a team since 1999, when they began their project One Beach Plastic while visiting Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, Northern California. They have rambled 1000 meters of tideline on this one beach hundreds of times to gather plastic that is washing out of the Pacific Ocean. From this one beach, they have collected over two tons of material. By carefully "curating" the bits of plastic, they fashion works of art that matter-of-factly show, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. Their beach plastic artworks have been featured in over 70 exhibitions in galleries and museums, educational and science centers, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist Windows, United Nations World Environment Day, Cummings Gallery at Stanford University, University of San Francisco, California Academy of Sciences, Sausalito's Marine Mammal Center, and Hong Kong's Ocean Film Festival. The Lang's work was recently exhibited in San Francisco at Lands End, at the former Cliff House and at the Randall Museum, and they have a permanent display at the natural sciences area of the Oakland Museum of California. www.beachplastic.com

This event is free for members + one guest. $5 for non-members. All participants MUST REGISTER.

You will be sent sign-in information for the event after you have registered and a reminder will be sent the day of the event.

Best regards,
ecoartspace

ONE BEACH PLASTIC MUSEUM

ONE BEACH PLASTIC MUSEUM is now an affiliate charter of the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities, a world-wide network of little beach museums. Think small and you can start a museum too.

Scroll HERE to see our listing.

Judith writes:

As a child, I aspired to be a paleontologist. Every day after school with friends I would mine the white limestone cliffs in the woods near our house. We always hoped to find a dinosaur and spent untold hours excavating a mound where we were certain we would discover a skeleton. We were convinced that the bowl-shaped recess in a boulder was an impression left by a dinosaur egg. Yes, we had our grand imaginings but we did in fact unearth many small fragments of crustacean and clam shells. 

The Natural History Museum of Dallas has an excellent display of fossils and ammonites from the surrounding area. So, I would go to look and identify what we were digging up. I would longingly gaze into the specimen vitrines and wish upon wish that someday one of my fossils would be on display with a label attribution that had details about the rarity of the find; the latitude and longitude of the site, notes about the Era, Period, Epoch and yes, across the vast expanse of geological time would be MY name as the collector. 

Fast forward some 65 years, I now find myself to be an artist/archeologist mining the beach in search for remnants of plastic, future fossils from the Plasticene. 

And now with the prospect of establishing our own Little Beach Museum, my dream will come true.

I am reminded of the common expression: “If you don’t like what’s on the TV, change the channel.”  Or as Don Draper from Mad Men says, “If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." 

Richard and I are thrilled, thrilled to establish the first West Coast Little Beach Museum satellite as a place devoted to changing the conversation about art and about plastic. And speaking of little, we do believe in parameters. With all of the daunting facts about plastic pollution, we focus on just 1000 meters of one beach to create a graspable metric relative to the scope of the global problem. So we say, “two people, one beach, just one thousand meters of one beach.”  

Seaspan Sees the Light

THE "CLEANER CALIFORNIA COAST" KIOSK AT THE GRANDI BUILDING 

IN DOWNTOWN POINT REYES STATION

This kiosk next to the old Grandi Building is staffed with volunteers of all ages. Promoting "Leave No Trace" concepts, it came to town in 2010 as the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center spearheaded by Dona Larkin. Madeline Hope saw the space available and converted it to serve the initiatives of Cleaner California Coast and West Marin Food Systems. Volunteers have produced art installations and pop-up educational waste events. 

Pictured are four generations of the Larkin family who care for the coastline. From the left are son Ian with June, the French bulldog; granddaughter Finley; Dona with Lucy, the miniature pincher; and Great Grandma Marty. The kiosk serves visitors and locals with resources for land and and coast stewardship and climate action tips. Recycle, renew, reuse and rethink use of all resources.

 

Time and tide...

 

What goes 'round...

Big thanks to Rudi Dundas from the Dance Palace Art Committee who championed our work and extended the exhibition invitation. Her ongoing enthusiasm means the world to us.

We are excited to announce that during our reception Matter Out Of Place will be played on the big screen in the Church Space at the Dance Palace. 

You can also watch Matter Out of Place here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C_c45EJyb1_rDlXqi_9f6bMomCanv0xw/view

 

Rockport Retrospective

• The original Rockport Center for the Arts was housed in a 6,000-square-foot Victorian-era building, which was severely damaged and subsequently demolished after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. 
• 
  
  
  The Rockport Center for the Arts underwent a significant rebuild with the construction of a new $12.5 million, state-of-the-art facility that opened in December 2022.

In 2013 we were in Rockport where we worked with workshop participants to collect plastic and create Washed  Ashore 

We are thrilled to be invited to send work to the AIR Retrospective.

 https://www.rockportartcenter.com/exhibitions/airretrospective

Our trip to Texas in 2013 took us to the town of Rockport, 40 minutes north of Corpus Christi. In 2012, The Rockport Art Center, with its go-getting staff, sponsored a film festival that featured the short film about us One Plastic Beach. They found the film compelling enough to invite us to their new residency program for a weeklong workshop and exhibit. Rockport, a Gulf Coast fishing village, now includes a retirement community and a weekend getaway spot for San Antonio and Houston. As they say in Rockport, "the Texans come down for the weekend." So many Texas-es.

Rockport sits on Aransas Bay, the main body of the gulf, separated by a string of barrier islands 500 miles long from Galveston to Brownsville. This is the Aransas National Wildlife refuge, a birders’ paradise with terns, roseate spoonbills, ducks galore, herons, ibis—and, the main winter home of the Whooping Crane, almost lost to the world with a population of 21. These days, there are over 430 in the wild and a lot of them live in the environs of Rockport. Tourist dollars fly south for the winter viewing—the cranes wouldn't be here were it not for some avid, environmentally savvy folks.

We were enlisted to collect local beach plastic then put together an exhibit at the Center. We know from Kehoe Beach that the plastic can on the beach can be intermittent. What if we don't find any plastic? Just in case, we brought prints of our work, but they'd make a pretty paltry show in the five rooms we had to fill. And the prints we make are fine, but we would need the real stuff to make an impact.

Well, it was all fine, if you count fine as finding boatloads of plastic. The beach at Matagorda Island was covered. With our group of 10 workshop participants, in six hours we collected 55 hard hats, 5 plastic pigs, 11 plastic trucks. But only one nurdle and one Kraft Handi-snack® cheese spreader. There was ample plastic to fill a dozen galleries.

Years ago, we arrived at the notion that the plastic presented in the most matter-of-fact way tells the story best. We've been aiming at the "oh! that was once mine" feeling. To take ownership of the problematic nature of plastic pollution. Our group really got into that feeling. Just tell it like it is. This is what there is—no need to embellish.

As a centerpiece, a group of hard hats went up on the wall in martial order. One of the most compelling finds was a trotline or a long line. A great snarl of heavy-duty monofilament with hundreds of baited hooks and empty water bottles strung along for floatation and retrieval. These deadly pieces of gear catch the top of the food chain creatures—sharks primarily. We mounted the line and hooks on the wall, washed off but just as found—a powerful sculpture with a heart-breaking message.

To simulate plastic floating in the ocean, each participant helped to attach shards, fragments, and identifiable pieces of plastic on to wires to hang from the ceiling in a squared shape curtain, making a plastic-walled room within a room.

We've often said, our best times with people are spent hard at work. We enjoy the affability that comes with a focus on a task. In the art center’s workshop room, a lively quilting bee atmosphere prevailed so it was a daily struggle to pry the folks away.

It was the energetic and creative Rockport folks that made our stay a trip to remember.

Row upon row of hardhats

The trotline

A Room Within a Room

Richard doing a computer search,
on a quest for the answer to “why so many piggy banks?”

 

The mystery of washed ashore piggy banks continue to make news with the article in the latest issue of the Beachcomber's Alert newsletter.

The AIR Retrospective opened on October 4. Many thanks to curator Caty Arnold who did such a great job installing our work. Yes, the piggy banks are, once again, on display.

Kingdom Animalia

After making our first collaborative sculpture Trophy Fish in 2000, we turned away from using our plastic to make animals and such; and decided to only show the plastic, as is, in its matter of fact form. 

When Doug Woodring from Ocean Recovery Alliance encouraged us to reach new audiences through online exhibitions, we took the bait and submitted an image of our Trophy Fish to Exhibizone's Kingdom Animalia who made many promises about how they would help to spread the word about our project.

Here are our digital "stamps." 

https://artist.callforentry.org/festivals_unique_info.php?ID=15626

Here's what might happen:

Stay tuned.

Trophy Fish is made of plastic lids and caps, collected from Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Stacked concentrically, the dense colors are playful and generous. In their quantity, the lids are purposeful and attractive.

Our curiosity about these ubiquitous pieces of plastic developed into a concept. Inspired by our explorations of the shore, we decided to make something to celebrate our time there. After much aesthetic wrangling, we were pleased to present a trophy fish: sea, time, fish, our place in history—a show-off piece.