Beautiful Trash: Sustainability as Condition, Not Cure, in Contemporary Art

Trash is no longer just a byproduct—it’s a proposition. As the ecological crisis deepens, the art world—traditionally enmeshed in systems of extraction and spectacle—is increasingly poised to make a meaningful bid into sustainability. And a growing number of artists are rejecting clean aesthetics and redemptive narratives in favor of something murkier: entropy, mutation, memory. Waste, once a critique, is now the material and the message.

Two New York exhibitions embody this shift: Max Hooper Schneider’s “Scavenger” at Pace’s 125 Newbury and Tom Friedman’s “Detritus” at Lehmann Maupin. The works could not look more different, but both artists treat the discarded not as something to erase, but as something to engage with. Together, these exhibitions highlight the potential for the art world to make a meaningful bid into the sustainability space. Where the focus isn’t cleaning up the mess, but instead showing us how to live inside it.

Survival through mutation: corrosion, collapse and hybrid worlds in Max Hooper Schneider’s “Scavenger”

If there’s a poster child for post-apocalyptic materialism, it might be Max Hooper Schneider. “Scavenger” marks his New York solo debut, presenting a provocative vision of sustainability that refuses redemption or purity. Inside Pace’s Tribeca space, the exhibition unfolds as a sprawling pseudo-laboratory of future, present and past: video geodes of the L.A. fires, train tracks made of teeth, a melting gargantuan Oreo, copper-coated toys and mutated barnacles. This is no fantasy of renewal. It’s corrosion-as-creativity where speculative ecosystems are both grotesque and regenerative.

Rather than offer solutions, Schneider confronts the mess as material and metaphor, reminding us that there is “no plot,” only a “set of conditions.” His liminal sculptures—part diorama, part dystopian coral reef—visualize what he calls trans-habitats: zones of contaminated regeneration where synthetic and organic, human and nonhuman, collapse into one another. Mutation becomes not merely an aesthetic, but a force: where, he tells Observer, the discarded and corroded “regain life-giving agency.”

Schneider’s practice of “painting with trash” mirrors the systems he highlights. He forages globally—scrapyards, estate sales, beach parking lots, bio-labs, eBay—and recombines waste into works that recall both geological strata and technological ruin. His objects are intentionally unstable, alive with entropy: his copper sculptures, shifting in patina, behave like “a mycelial network or mushroom colony,” organisms of decay and potential.

Echoing the myth of the golem—creatures formed from clay to serve as protectors—his hybrid forms operate not as warnings but as proposals, suggesting that if art is to engage sustainability meaningfully, it must do more than reflect the world’s waste. It must metabolize, commune and cohabit with it.

Trash as memory: compression, control and the demand for attention in Tom Friedman’s “Detritus”

If Schneider builds ecological fever dreams, Tom Friedman’s “Detritus” is an eye bath of compression: minimalist, formal, psychologically charged. Long associated with sustainability and uncanny material transformation, Friedman returns to New York with a painting show, and hints he may never reverse that shift.

Where his sculptural work once twisted, bent or stretched materials, here he turns to a Sargent-like portraiture of the discarded. Trash becomes image: not merely what we throw away, but what we remember. Each painting begins with discarded fragments from his personal archive—offcuts, wrappers, scraps—carefully arranged, photographed and re-rendered in acrylic. The results hover between trompe l’oeil realism and atmospheric abstraction, forms that oscillate between crystallization and dissolution into the void. There is a palpable tension between control and entropy, seeing and knowing.

For Friedman, the discarded is never meaningless—it carries memory: “Something that has been discarded has history,” he tells Observer. “It’s gone through process… garbage is familiar. It’s from our memory. It’s a doorway.” 

In “Detritus,” trash becomes more than residue; it becomes a vessel of accumulated time, charged with presence. These paintings are “compressions” of experience—“zip-files,” he calls them. Memory functions like the biosphere: layered, interdependent, tenuous. What we forget—or choose to discard—still lingers, shaping the present.

“The art world is kind of going through a sugar crash right now,” Friedman notes. His practice resists that volatility. Approaching 60, having left behind destructive habits like smoking, Friedman positions this body of work as part of a broader meditation on sustainability—not only ecological but psychological, emotional and cultural. The challenge is in remaining equable in a society addicted to “manic reward.”

“You have to be on the edge of infinity,” he says. In “Detritus,” Friedman invites us to stay with the mess, to recognize its textures and rhythms, and ourselves within it. Memory, like ecology, is a system we inhabit and cannot discard.

Trash as method: reconfiguration over restoration 

What unites Schneider and Friedman is less their materials than their shared rejection of purity as a sustainability ideal. Both reside in disorder, embracing contamination as fact and inviting cohabitation with it. This sensibility is increasingly visible across contemporary art. El Anatsui transforms aluminum waste into monumental textiles; Kelly Jazvac works with ‘plastiglomerates’—plastic-rock hybrids formed on beaches; Torkwase Dyson builds abstract infrastructures from climate and racial violence’s residues. Jessi Reaves repurposes thrifted upholstery and industrial offcuts into sculptures that resist tidy function but insist on presence.

Together, these artists forge a regenerative imagination. This isn’t art about sustainability. It’s art as sustainability: reconfiguration over restoration, entanglement over erasure. As artists grapple with waste in concept and form, the larger art ecosystem is playing catch-up. The gallery and fair circuit has long relied on carbon-heavy logistics: air freight, disposable booth builds, endless spectacle. But cracks are forming in that model.

Independent spaces often lead this shift. At Del Vaz Projects in Los Angeles, sustainability is not a box to check, but a way of working: “Sustainability less as a fixed goal and more as a continuous practice of listening—reactivating materials, ideas, and histories instead of consuming them,” a Del Vaz Projects representative tells Observer. This model resists extractive cycles and promotes maintenance and reuse over spectacle.

Institutional practices are evolving as well. At UC San Diego, chief campus curator Jessica Berlanga Taylor approaches commissioning through a framework of ecological accountability: “We don’t treat sustainability just as a theme, but as a design and stewardship brief—starting with what’s already in our ecosystems, favoring reversible assemblies, end-of-life planning, and transparency.”

Meanwhile, big galleries are getting serious. Members of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC)—including Pace Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, Lisson and Hauser & Wirth—have committed to measurable carbon reductions, modular exhibition design, sustainable shipping and internal carbon budgeting. And tools like the Artist Sustainability Toolkit from GCC and platforms like Artists Commit work to provide functioning models for integrating sustainability into every phase of exhibition-making, from shipping alternatives and install methods to sourcing and lifecycle planning.

Auction houses are also taking note. For example, Sotheby’s Institute will host a conference in London on Nov. 5 on sustainability in the art market, inviting dialogue on greener logistics, climate-conscious collecting and environmental accountability. On the collector side, ESG considerations have been factoring into acquisitions—even if the application is uneven—many are willing to pay a premium for sustainable options. And for top collectors, sustainability is becoming less of a periphery issue and more central to their collecting. Collectors are asking for their works to be shipped by consolidated land transport and sea freight instead of air, and by utilizing QR codes, they can actively engage in real change. These steps signal a strong shift from symbolic gestures to actual logistical reform.

Don’t call it perfect—just make it public

The danger now isn’t just failure – it’s “greenhushing,” where institutions hide sustainability efforts to avoid scrutiny. But perfection isn’t the point. Public, iterative engagement is. Sustainability in the art world won’t be tidy. It will be adaptive, uncertain and, ideally, transparent.

That’s where artists like Schneider and Friedman lead. Not by solving the climate crisis, but by modeling how to cohabit with our detritus, to metabolize “failure” and to invent new ways of seeing. To find survival not in purity, but in reconfiguration. As Schneider reminds us: “There’s no waste, only potential.”

Tom Friedman’s “Detritus” is on view at Lehmann Maupin through October 18, 2025, and Max Hooper Schneider’s “Scavenger” is on view at Pace’s 125 Newbury through October 25, 2025.