The Umbrella Project

I started my blog in 2020, shortly before switching my website to one with a nicer portfolio page. In that switch, I wasn't able to transfer the original posts over. I'm going recreate a few of those older posts (with some updates!) so I can have everything in one place. This one was originally posted in July of 2020.

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A couple weeks before Christmas of 2019, I passed five discarded umbrellas between Bowling Green and my office on Water Street. Something about the fifth one, sitting in the gutter in front of my building, made me pick it up, turn around, and go back for the others. I laid all of them out to dry behind our row of desks, and I didn't really have an explanation to give my coworkers at the time.

Suddenly the world was full of broken umbrellas. I don't know if it was a particularly windy, rainy winter or if I had just been walking by umbrellas for my entire life without noticing - but they sure were there now. I collected about 50 between that day in mid December and the arrival of the pandemic in NYC in March, just by picking up the ones I saw as I went about my normal business in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Sometimes, if it had rained the day before, I would solicit strange looks from my neighbors or my office's doormen as I walked into the elevator with a whole armful.

I started studying them. I had never looked very closely at an umbrella before, but as it turns out, they're all pretty much the same (at least the ones that end up thrown into the street). Sometimes one of the caps that holds the fabric taut over the metal frame had just popped off - these were easily repaired and added to the donate pile. Most of the others had serious damage to the metal frame: a bent, or snapped arm. There were often rust stains where the elbows rubbed against fabric, and sometimes the fabric was torn or deteriorating.

In the hours and days I spent dissecting umbrellas, carefully separating fabric from metal from plastic, spooling thread from carefully ripped seams and disassembling as much of the hardware as I could, I wondered about their lives before coming to me. I imagined their owners in the moments before they decided to throw the umbrella into the street or the umbrella blew away, and I could only picture a scene from and old timey cartoon:

A man in a trench coat struggles against the wind with an umbrella and a briefcase. The rain comes down in sheets and he can barely see. A gust of wind tears his hat from his head and inverts his umbrella. He stops to attempt to turn the umbrella right-side-out again, cursing the wind and shaking his fist toward the sky. A truck drives by and he is soaked by a wave of muddy puddle water. Damning it all to hell, he hurls the uncooperative umbrella into the offending puddle and starts off toward his office, still cursing the sky and soaked to the skin.

I have 50 bad days; 50 moments when someone just couldn't manage; 50 decisions to let go, in a pieces in my bedroom. And, 50 collections of petroleum, iron ore, copper and more; 50 trips from China to New York (I've read the tags - they were pretty much all made in China); 50 iterations of all of the carbon emissions, human labor, and waste that got that umbrella into the hands of someone in New York.

This inspires a feeling both of freedom and of obligation. Working with reclaimed material always requires a more playful and flexible approach...

For me, that includes diving right into prototyping and cutting myself a break if my technique isn't perfect (I'm learning to sew for this project - with a sewing machine last used by my mother in the 80s). But, it would be sad if the new life I gave them wasn't something greater than that of a gutter umbrella.

A Note from 2023

First of all, my writing style was a lot different 3 years ago.

When I originally wrote this post, I was umbrella obsessed. It was the primary outlet for my lockdown energy, and I'm grateful for that. I remember feeling like this exploration was going to be a defining part of my creative life for a long time.

And it was, for a while.

I brought them all to Nebraska and back, and then to NJ, and now to Providence. I started learning how to actually sew, and I upgraded my sewing machine.

At some point I stopped working with the umbrellas, though. I did make one building portrait when I settled down again in Providence, and thought at the time that it might be the start of a new series... but so far, I haven't felt drawn back to them. I'm not sure why.

Also, I never see umbrellas on the ground anymore! I don't know if that phenomenon was specific to NYC, or if people have stopped letting go on windy days, or going outside in the rain entirely.

It's a good thing, both that there's less plastic in the stormwater runoff and that I did not keep collecting materials at such an unsustainable rate.

But, maybe I'm waiting for a sign.