This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 25, 2011 - On Sunday nights or predawn Monday mornings you can sometimes find Jenny Murphy on an unusual quest in the streets and alleys of St. Louis. She doesn't look at garbage the same way you do.
And she doesn't want you to either.
"I've always been attracted to things that other people throw away," said the Washington University art grad. "I always look at them and think, 'You could use that for something.'"
Today, that's what she does. The 24-year-old Southside resident is executive director of Perennial, a non-profit she founded early this year that breathes new life into old furnishings otherwise destined for burial at the dump. It's all about sustainability, Murphy said.
"There's a big resurgence of DIY and fixing up what you've got and making your own instead of buying," she said. "We want to take that to the next level."
That level involves planters made from old light fixtures, dry erase boards created from old window frames or just worn tables and chairs being fixed up. Racing to beat the garbage man, Murphy has run into any number of interesting items awaiting pick up, from tables and chairs to an upright piano. All of them are just grist for the creative mill.
Creativity isn't just limited to Murphy. She wants to share it, so Perennial offers classes in everything from upholstery to furniture refinishing to more eclectic topics like building bicycle trailers.
The idea originally came from Murphy's work with ex-offenders through a program at a local agency. The initiative involved the subjects taking broken items such as chairs and creating unique new designs that were auctioned when completed.
"Just having someone value the work that they had done was a great experience for them," she said. "They'd say, 'This artist told me that my work is good. He's a real artist.' I would say, you are a real artist. You created this awesome thing."
But that wasn't her first experience with garbage as art. In college, she was required to make a proposal for a piece of public art and decided to collect bulk trash from University City, fix it up and then hold a free sale for the community. It planted the germ of an idea though the project never got funded.
"It's getting people to recognize their personal creativity as a really accessible and powerful tool to live sustainably. I think that, as the trends in sustainability grow, there are different kinds of barriers for people," she said. "One of them is money."
Money is a challenge for Perennial as well. The operation still runs out of the basement of Murphy's apartment, leaving little storage space and cramping growth. She jokes that she has a "very small" economic model, which is another way of saying that she, and programming and development assistant Brie Cella, work for free. The organization relies mostly on grants. Perennial won $10,000 for its business plan from Washington University's Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies this past spring.
Murphy hopes to sign a lease soon on an East Carondelet space that will allow the initiative to have an ongoing retail home, as opposed to marketing its creations at craft shows. Sometimes, she even barters for class time under arrangements where students learn by making and she sells the finished product.
"Working out of my apartment, we have to keep it pretty limited to projects that we know we'll remake and sell quickly or projects that I absolutely know we'll use in a class coming up," she said. "Once we move into a larger space, the goal is to create some partnerships with area thrift stores so we are not wasting time and gas going around looking for this stuff."
Murphy's work also has an educational mission to advance sustainability in the community. That's where Perennial's methods and classes come in.
"Part of what we do is teach environmentally sensitive methods," she said. "We teach you how to use milk paints, natural waxes."
Perennial also uses special earth-friendly strippers and employs hand tools instead of power tools. She said some green chemicals are not widely available in St. Louis.
The Dallas native said she's enjoyed her time here since coming to town in 2005 and thinks the initiative has drawn inspiration from the area as well.
"I think it came out of this place because as I was in school developing the ideas behind this, I was also learning a lot about the city and the different communities here," she said. "What always intrigued me most about the city was the different revitalizations that were going on in different communities. I saw this act of taking individual objects, taking a table, fixing it up, giving it new life as parallel with buying a building that was falling down."
And so, for now, Murphy continues her Sunday night race against the garbage truck. For her, it's all about seeing potential in objects no one else wants.
"I have training in the creative process so I think about an object in maybe a different way than somebody else," she said. "Maybe if my neighbor also had that training and those skills, they wouldn't have thrown it away in the first place. So my goal is to teach all of my neighbors."
David Baugher is a freelance writer.