Pop artist makes treasures for
Americans, using their trash
By Jessica Farrish For The Fayette Tribune
A premier New York
"cerealist" artist is in West Virginia, and he's talking to Mountain
State kids.
Michael Albert is like most
artists: his art started in an unconventional way. However, Albert's artistic
epiphany and his pioneer leap into pop art was really, really original — even
for an artist's.
He shared his story Wednesday
with a group of moms and kids at the Shady Spring Public Library.
In the 1980s, Albert was a
business major at the Stern School of Business of New York University in
Manhattan. He liked to visit the many museums in the city. He appreciated that
some museum visits were free.
One day, as he toured the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was struck by a new urge.
"That's when I had a dream
to try to be an artist myself," Albert recalled Wednesday. "I just
had this crazy dream that maybe 100 years from now, when I'm not around
anymore, maybe something that I created could be in a museum, and, maybe 50
years from now, say, some of you could come with your own children and
grandchildren and look at my work and remember that we met at the library at
Shady Spring."
He went back to his room, he
said, and started a self-portrait, drawing himself as composed by items that
appeared in his dorm room. His showed his first self-portrait, finished 27
years ago, to those at the workshop.
Over the years, he said, he
began focusing on collage art.
In Albert's own words, he's a
"cerealist" artist. He creates collages from cereal boxes.
Kids and adults at the workshop
showed enthusiasm for Albert's work. Although he inspires kids, Albert uses
whimsy and throw-away materials to construct visual representations of
different concepts. Some of his pieces, like "The 23rd Psalm" and
"The Lord's Prayer," visualize faith. He "cereal-ized"
history with the collages "The Preamble to the Constitution" and
"The Gettysburg Address."
In 2014, he made "Chemical
Spill," a collage that was inspired by the Elk River chemical spill in
Charleston.
In "Chemical Spill,"
a slightly forbidding collage, Albert twists culturally reassuring fonts like
the Kellog's "ll" and Lipton "Li" into an artistic warning.
"Mostly, I make art by
cutting up cereal boxes and recycling different materials with my art," he
said. He added that he wants people to look at his art and ask, "Who is
Michael Albert? Why did he cut up cereal boxes?"
"Maybe that's a crazy
dream," Albert noted. "But it was my dream."
A father and businessman who
owns Sir Real Juice in New York City, Albert keenly markets his art, offering
his prints in a book ("An Artist's America"), puzzles ("Map of
the USA," "The Number Pi") and postcards and greeting cards.
His work has been featured in
The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and smaller newspapers around the
United States.
Raleigh County Solid Waste
Authority Education Director Sherrie Hunter said Wednesday that her
organization brought Albert back to West Virginia after she'd seen Albert's
workshop at the Youth Museum in Beckley last year.
Hunter is the organizer of a
school recycling program that's heading into its 15th year in Raleigh County
schools, and helped to organize school recycling in Fayette County. This past
school year, Raleigh County students turned in 432 tons of recyclable items,
Hunter reported.
"We thought, what a
perfect opportunity because students in Raleigh County have been recycling
through elementary, middle and high schools for 14 years," Hunter said.
"What's a more perfect place to have Michael Albert visit than our county,
which has been promoting 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' for the last 14 years?"
She said that Albert's
eye-popping collages are a perfect fit with her program message that "old
things" can be turned into something new.
"He shows students that,
yes, it's in a recycling bin, but you can reuse it," Hunter said.
"You can put your own spin on it and create your own masterpiece."
Albert is touring and will be
at the Raleigh County Solid Waste Authority in Lanark today from 2 to 5 p.m.
Friday, he'll visit the Lively Family Amphitheater in Oak Hill at 10 a.m. and 7
p.m. On Saturday, Albert will appear at the Heritage Festival in Fayetteville
from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Tour information and views of
Albert's artwork is available on his website, www.michaelalbert.com.