Artists For Humanity Encourage Environmental Awareness

Artists for Humanity was founded in 1991, in Boston, MA, as a place where teen youth could come to practice and develop their talents in art and media.  Artists for Humanity empowers and employs Boston teens in an intensive program of arts and enterprise.

AFH partners youth in small groups with professional artists and designers to design, create, market and sell art products.  One of the examples of the art work they have created are these colorful stools crafted out of 200 plastic bags:

The plastic stool tops are the design idea of Jamison Sellers, AFH’s 3-D Studio Project Coordinator, who developed the idea while working on his senior thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design two years ago.   To create the stool tops, the first layer of the stool top is created by fusing colored bags with an iron then placing it at the bottom of the round plastic bag press, which makes it easy to create specific branding or patterns.

The stools have received the Social Responsibility Award by the American Society of Interior Designers  at the 2011 Architectural Digest Home Design Show in New York City.

The students at AFH also learned that using custom reusable shopping bags was a much more responsible way to shop after finding how easy it was to collect the 200 plastic bags it took to create one bar stool.