Marilyn Brackney Creates Art to Teach About Reuse and Recycling

In 1988 Marilyn Brackney, a trained artist and educator, was teaching art in a public elementary school in Indiana. She was also in charge of buying art supplies. One day her principal announced he had to cut her next semester’s budget from $1,000 to $250.

While Brackney was looking for grants to cover some of the lost funds, she also began collecting discarded items to reuse as art materials. Her next challenge was to create projects from castoffs that would interest the students. She developed a long list over the next two years and posted the information in a website, The Imagination Factory which has now been visited by millions of people.

Earth Day celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1990. That was the same year a US. District Court forced Indiana to accept excess trash from the East Coast although their local landfills were almost all filled up. Brackney decided to protest with a project that focused the public’s attention on the issue: Trashasaurus Rex, a 300-pound dinosaur, 9-1/2′ tall and 11′ long, made entirely of household rubbish.

Trashasaurus Rex by Marilyn Brackney.

T. Rex started with an armature of scrap lumber and chicken wire and a dryer hose for the neck. His belly was stuffed with 300 plastic grocery sacks, 40 dry cleaning bags and assorted polystyrene containers. Then a “skin” of six layers of paper mache was covered with thousands of castoffs — broken watches, toys, jewelry, anything that could be attached with a glue gun. His mane consists of 50 stuffed gloves and mittens — one for each state — which symbolizes that everyone in the U.S. contributes to the solid waste problem and each person has responsibility to fix it.

Detail of T. Rex complete with a "Made in USA" tag.

After T. Rex made frequent public appearances in Indiana and Florida to benefit the environment, Brackney donated the discard dino to the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum of North Carolina (which had lost their entire collection to flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd) in honor of the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Cummins Engine donated transportation via a Landstar Express truck.