Photographed for a story about sTo Len and how he is the first to do an artist residency with the Department of Sanitation.
The Art of Water, Waste, and Wonder
sTo Len, Department of Sanitation Artist in Residence, NY
Join us for a talk on interdisciplinary art, collaborating with water, and the act of embedding in a municipal agency as an artwork. Len will cover his evolution as an artist and his on-going Sanitation residency that has included ride-a-longs on collection trucks, activating lost archives, and trips to waste processing centers across NYC.
sTo Len is a genre fluid artist from New York by way of Virginia and Vietnam. Len works within this cultural dichotomy by incorporating issues of place, identity, history, and the environment. Growing up in the Washington DC area, sTo was influenced by the art and activism of the local punk scene, which he continues to embody through artwork that combines those ethics with experimental takes on traditional craft. sTo has exhibited his work internationally and co-founded the alternative art space Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn which held over a hundred exhibitions and events between 2004 – 2019.
The cross-disciplinary nature of Len’s practice has included printmaking with polluted bodies of water, recycling debris from coastal cleanups into art materials, creating a pirate radio station in a desert town in New Mexico, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. Len was the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Virginia and is a member of Works on Water, a group of artists and activists working with and about water in the face of climate change and environmental justice concerns. He is currently the artist in residence at the NY Department of Sanitation.
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