Meet Eleanor Ray

Eleanor is the Executive Director of The WasteShed. She discovered creative reuse as an installation and costume artist working in entirely post-consumer materials, and developed her ideas in the nurturing environment of SCRAP PDX. She was also General Manager of the Creative Reuse Warehouse, and spearheaded their collaboration with the ReBuilding Exchange before founding The WasteShed in 2014. She has a BA in Art History from Reed College.

The WasteShed is a nonprofit creative reuse center located in Humboldt Park. Their mission is to divert reusable art and educational materials from the landfill, and provide an affordable resource for artists, teachers, and the community at large. Founded in 2014, they have taken over 50 tons of materials, with a value of nearly $1 million, out of the waste stream and put them back to work in our community. They are open to the public 6 days a week, and provide free or deeply discounted materials to hundreds of area schools and nonprofits. They also host affordable art and craft workshops, as well as field trips for children and youth to learn about reuse, waste prevention, and creative problem solving.

Q+A

What do you know for sure?

Climate Collapse and White Supremacy are immediate threats to our society and human life. Home grown tomatoes are delicious. Everyone's life is improved by art whether they like it or not. Other people's ideas of success and normalcy will fuck with you.

How long do you think you would you survive the zombie apocalypse? Why?

Probably not long, I'm not much of a fighter. I'm more interested in how the zombie apocalypse narrative plays on our anxieties about the breakdown of power structures and systems of social control, and how we can dissolve those systems constructively without requiring a global pandemic. I'm also interested in creating educational systems that will empower young people to creatively adapt to the radically altered economies that will arise when our unsustainable growth stops being sustained, which is not the same thing as a zombie apocalypse, but you wouldn't think so the way people don't want to talk about it.

What do you geek out about?

Art materials, embodied energy and embodied labor, old tools, textiles, how material culture has changed in the last 200 years (particularly how trash was invented and sold to people), urban infrastructure

What’s your craziest idea?

Probably a tossup between "Depave All Chicago Alleys" and "Total Transparency in The Wastestream/Reuse is Green Infrastructure/Make it Possible for Everyone to Stop Buying New Things." Really depends on your framework for "crazy," but I've literally never heard anyone talk about depaving the alleys and replacing them with greenspace as the only way to make Chicago liveable 100 years from now, except me, to my friends. I love the alleys and spend a lot of time in them, but they are a horrific use of space, create flooding, and they provide an effortless "away" that is largely responsible for Chicago's appalling waste culture. If I had to do a TED talk about something I'm almost totally unqualified to talk about, it would be this.

What do you wish you had more time for?

My whole relationship to time is kind of uncomfortable, but I think that's a really common experience under capitalism. What you "make time for" when you're not getting money or waiting to die is the way that you create yourself, and that is terrible to contemplate. That said, the most obvious answer to this is my art practice. I really do technically have time for it, but once you've been to a residency or similar situation where your only reason for existing in that space is to make work, it's hard not to miss the quality of concentration you can achieve in that context. I'm so impressed by the people who can create these spaces for themselves in their day to day lives without feeling guilty about not doing other things, or feeling bad about not making work, which is almost worse.

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Photo credit: Jamie Kelter Davis Photography