 "Photo: Mike Paschal/The Daily Texan")
“This is Heaven,” said Randy Jewart, founder of Austin Green Art, standing proudly before an expanse of tattered windows, rusted tools and industrial ghosts.
Remnants of artistic endeavors long past peek from behind relics of renovation while diligent workers, reeking of creative industry, are scattered about the space.
Located in an unassuming hangar on the downtrodden Austin State School campus, the green organization is devoted to promoting sustainability through public art works and other projects. Its philosophy is a particularly remarkable one — that “Art for art’s sake is immoral” and in light of imminent environmental and economical crisis, the arts community should get off its high, institutionalized horse and provide a functional service.
The facility, a 4,000 square-foot industrial space, was obtained unexpectedly in a meeting with Austin State School representatives.
Such personal networking, it seems, is the life support of independent organizations like Austin Green Art. Of its annual $100,000 budget, roughly $20,000 to $30,000 comes from federal and city contracts, whereas the remaining majority flows from scattered sources of art philanthropy: corporate sponsors, small family foundations and earned income from its acclaimed Resolution Gardens program, a project that creates and maintains vegetable gardens for corporate or private residences.
The funds have been on the increase and this year, for the first time since its foundation, the group broke even in its support of Austin’s annual Earth Day celebration, recouping the $10,000 it expected to lose. This counted as a welcome victory to Jewart, who puts his attention “where I know I’ll be successful.”
But the recent climb in revenue was severely curbed by the downturn in the economy. The organization started out the year with a cancellation of more than $130,000 in garden building contracts. Injured by the lack of prospective funding, the group was forced to look to the federal government for support.
As observed by Jewart, federal stimulus money that seeks to provide assistance for the unemployed while supporting the “green job” industry is wasted on an arid climate absent of green job infrastructure.
Austin Green Art’s mission is to fill the void, providing one of the only sites for green employment in Austin. Despite dismal outlooks for the year, the group sparked a collaboration with Goodwill to provide green jobs for the community in landscaping, gardening and sustainable construction.
Ex-convicts and others hoping to reform their lives come to the group where they are paid minimum wage to participate in many eco-friendly projects such as “Grow Austin Weird,” which provides edible landscaping for the Austin community and “The Paper Project,” a collaboration with the UT Environmental Center to encourage corporations to reduce their consumption of paper products.
Larry, a 21-year-old participant in the program, was released from prison and hired by Goodwill to work for AGA, where he has since raised his awareness of environmental issues learning that, “without Earth, our money is nothing.”
All this seems to incubate in the eyes of Randy Jewart’s proud face. The AGA founder was formerly a professional artist exhibiting his work in New York and decorating homes, until he “realized what it all boiled down to” — namely, that art should socially and environmentally engage individuals.
