Business as Unusual Art event series

Here are some photos from the first art event in the series we have been organizing as a collaboration between the MIT Western Hemisphere Project, Sustainability@MIT, Global Poverty Initiative, and artist Cindy Snodgrass.

This is the gorgeous outdoor sculpture that goes with the event.

As participants arrived (mostly students, parents, and siblings considering it was Family Weekend at MIT) we had them spin a wheel to find out where they would be re-born according to actual income distributions in the world.

• 40% of people live on <$2 a day
• 40% live on $2-10 per day
• 19% live on $10-$150 per day
• 1% lives on >$150 per day ($54,750 per year)

Then they get a packet about a family with about that income level somewhere in the world and learn about the food they eat in a week.

With this information, they added to a growing collage featuring a map of how climate change is going to impact agriculture in the world.

Here is one of the resulting hexagons.

Then they started stamping shirts, cloth grocery bags, and fabric pieces with stamps related to food and water. Here are some more photos.

This will later get sewn up into a hand-made grocery bag.

A father looking on as his daughter stamps.

Stamping onto a bag made of the burlap from a coffee sack brought in from Latin America. We have burlap sacks from Costa Rica, Colombia, and Brazil among others.