Everything old is new again, including upcycling, on display at State History Museum

Reusing, repurposing, recycling, upcycling: In recent years, more and more artists and artisans have embraced turning something old into something new.

Think of the much-lauded and now-departed Matter Gallery in Olympia. Think of Ruby Re-Usable, also known as Diane Kurzyna, and her plastic-bag and candy-wrapper creations. Think of the Seattle Recycled Arts Festival.

It’s a modern movement — and it’s also, fittingly, something old, as illustrated by “Make/Do: A History of Creative Reuse,” a new exhibition at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma.

MaryMikel Stump, the museum’s director of audience engagement, came up with the idea for the exhibit while getting familiar with the museum’s collections and seeing an array of what she calls “wonderful orphans” that deserve to be seen but aren’t likely to fit into the narrative of a typical history exhibit.

She was particularly struck by a 5-foot-wide collage of an eagle and the Statue of Liberty, made in 1914 from rolled-up postage stamps that artist Sarah Erickson spent three decades collecting.

“It was the thing that first caught my eye in a way that made me sort of mourn for these objects,” Stump said at a press tour of the exhibition. “It’s pretty spectacular.”

She wanted to see that piece, which once hung in the Capitol building, take its place alongside contemporary repurposed art pieces.

“Creative reuse is such a Pacific Northwest thing, and it suddenly occurred to me that this is a Washington tradition,” she said. “We see it in our collections, and we see it every day.”

And it’s seen clearly in “Make/Do,” whose 180 objects are a mix of folk art, fine art and functional pieces.

The exhibition would fit right in at an art museum, though it has much to say about history and the days when wedding dresses were made of parachute silk and musical instruments from cigar boxes, washboards and washtubs.

A sign made with hundreds of American Federation of Labor buttons, a painting on a dustpan and an Art Deco soap carving find common ground with dresses covered with caution tape and aluminum can tabs, both created by celebrated Portland artist Nancy Judd, and playful sculptures assembled from recycled appliance parts and other findings by Graham Schodda of Bellingham.

Also on display are such prosaic items as dresses made from flour sacks and a Portland Trail Blazers jersey made of recycled polyester fabric (including a reputed 20 plastic bottles per uniform). There is a quilt made from Civil War uniforms and another that repurposes fabrics from an opera singer’s costumes, along with a quilt-inspired art piece with a patchwork of license plates.

The collection boasts items as folksy as a corncob pipe and as futuristic as construction blocks made of drywall waste and a wall made of rolled-up magazine pages, intended to offer affordable insulation, prototypes made by students at Washington State University.

Items were gathered from history museums and historical societies throughout the state — including several pieces from the Aberdeen Museum of History, which lost much of its collection in a June fire — and from the Tacoma Art Museum and private collections.

South Sound is well represented, with work by Olympia residents Pat Massoni, known for his Space Needle-inspired creations; Evan Clayton Horback, whose work combines painting with collage of found images; Jean Mandeberg, whose “Woven Checkerboard” is made of found tin on wood; and Gail Tremblay, of Mi’kmaq and Onondaga ancestry, who weaves baskets with 16-millimeter film and other repurposed materials. Also in the show is Evan Blackwell of Shelton, whose “Street Lens” was assembled from 3,700 drinking straws inside an aluminum ring.

It’s fitting, though, that the exhibit pays homage to Tacoma, where the museum is located. It opens with an over-the-top art bike created by the late Jack Falk, who rode all over town on the 400-pound conglomeration of license plates, Christmas lights, Mickey Mouse merchandise and more.

Falk, who died in 2015, had been a longtime volunteer at the museum, said lead curator Gwen Whiting. “It’s a little bittersweet to see the bike here as a reminder of someone who meant a lot to us,” she said.

Cartoonist RR Anderson of Tacoma illustrated a fun timeline that gives the exhibit context, including such milestones as the 1846 invention of the sewing machine and the 2017 advent of Tacoma’s plastic-bag ban.

And one of the show’s creative fashion statements is a paper dress printed with part of the front page of the Tacoma News Tribune. The dress, made in 1969 or 1970, wasn’t made of repurposed newspaper — but it fits with the spirit of the show, Stump told The Olympian.

“The imagery itself is repurposed,” she said, and the dress also represents a repurposing of paper as a material for clothing. It’s believed that the dress, given out by the News Tribune, was worn by Alaska Airlines flight attendants.

This story was originally published July 19, 2018 at 11:42 AM.