buy nothing gigantic baby mobile (after calder)

hudson, ohio

WORK IN PROGRESS. ESTIMATED BIRTH DATE ON BUY NOTHING GIFT DAY SPRING 2024…..

April 26, 2023

I posted onto the Hudson Buy Nothing Facebook group to explain the project and ask for donations and support. Buy Nothing is a group where neighbors give “gifts” of their household items to each other. No money is allowed. All gifts are equal, whether it’s a tree stump or diamond earrings. All Givers and Recipients are equal.

WISH: OLD & BROKEN CHILDREN’S TOYS for ART PROJECT

I’m starting another Buy Nothing sculpture! Last year, I asked for gifts of old and broken costume jewelry to make a giant Buy Nothing Necklace. It took me almost a year to make it, and I showed it on my front porch on Buy Nothing Gift Day on April 23, 2023. It just so happened that a local art curator for Lakeland Community College saw my Facebook post about the necklace and is going to put it in her art show of giant, oversized art pieces! This show will run from July 23-September 8 2023 and is humorously called THE BIG @SS @RT SHOW.

For this year, I’m going to make a truly gigantic baby mobile out of old and broken children’s toys! I’m inspired by Alexander Calder, the modernist avant-garde maker of mobiles. The modernist artists were typically urban men leading decidedly non-domesticated lives. They’re so very far from myself and from most of us in Buy Nothing, too. They’re urban. We’re small-town. They were usually single men living wild lives, a lot of them who didn’t really think much of women and women’s work, of taking care of loved ones and children and babies, of caring for our communities and our homes and our gardens and our families and our friends. We’re about helping and sharing and caring for each other. We share children’s clothes and children’s toys. We share plants and food and kitchen pots and pans. We gather up donations for those in need. We’re about the domestic side of life, which used to be called women’s work. Well, we are important, too. So, I’m going to mischievously thumb my nose at Calder by taking an idea he is most famous for – his elegant mobiles – and making one with broken children’s toys gifted from you at Buy Nothing Hudson. I’m going to make a giant mobile, but one that pays tribute to the domestic, to family and women, and to us. It’s going to be a little joke at Calder, but it’s also going to be beautiful in the end, and very very interesting. I hope I can pull it off, and that you all like and enjoy it, too.

I need smaller, lightweight toys that are broken or are no longer fit for playing with by kids. I don’t want to take any toys that kids could still use. I’d love to have broken plastic cars and trucks, broken dolls, very small stuffed animals, children’s board games with missing pieces, children’s puzzles with missing pieces, children’s books that have been scribbled on or torn, and broken action figures. Anything that has missing parts, or is broken or damaged would be fine. I will take them apart and reassemble them into a giant baby mobile.