Buttsy: Banksy-Style Street Artist Crafts Cigarette Butt-Based Assemblages
Article by Urbanist, filed under Street Art & Graffiti in the Art category
Working to raise awareness of litter, Buttsy builds sculptural collages out of found objects, with a strong emphasis on some of the most toxic offenders: cigarette butts. Like Banksy, he works quietly and invisibly in the night.
They may seem small, but butts create over one and a half billion pounds of trash per year. And while society has gotten better about shaming those who toss them on the street, we could still do more. To that end, Buttsy has begun shaping butts out of butts, as it were.
"A lot of my friends and people who work in my industry [advertising] smoke, and they just leave their butts everywhere," Landon Beamer, a.k.a. Buttsy, told the CityPages. "I think that for some reason they don't see it as trash, but I've been very aware of it. That's why I decided to find a way to make people look at their butts differently."
Based in Minnesota, Beamer has put out dozens of work around the Twin Cities, tying into different pop culture themes and using what he finds along the way. He has also lived in Boston and Seattle, and is considering taking his project on the road — and anywhere he goes, there are sure to be butts.
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