'Garbage Barge Revisited' in Islip

You remember the Mobro 4000. No? They do at the Islip Art Museum, where its latest exhibit, "Garbage Barge Revisited: Art From Dross," opened Wednesday.

Mobro 4000 was the barge that departed from New York 25 years ago -- March 1987 -- with roughly 3,000 tons of garbage generated from the Town of Islip. Its odyssey took it to North Carolina, where the haul was to be turned into methane gas. But Mobro's refuse was refused.

Subsequently, the barge was turned away from port after port along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts -- all the way to Belize in Central America -- returning to New York in July. Its cargo eventually was incinerated in Brooklyn.

Along the way, the Mobro and the Town of Islip attracted international notoriety, fodder for both the nightly news and the nightly monologues of Johnny Carson.

MUSEUM SHIFT When the Islip Arts Council took over management of the art museum two years ago, council director Lynda Moran led a planning session with the curatorial staff, headed by Mary Lou Cohalan. "We suggested a show focusing on repurposed material" -- recyclable trash -- Cohalan recalls. The council's mission, Moran says, was to "keep the same high quality of exhibits but link the themes more directly to community issues."

Meanwhile, there has been an upside, Cohalan says, to the town's 1987 embarrassment. "Islip Town became a leader in recycling," she says, "one of the first to do it as a nonvoluntary thing and one of the first to form and support an agency, Keep Islip Clean, to promote recycling."

"We remembered the incident -- and it seemed a perfect tie-in," says Beth Giacummo, Cohalan's successor as museum director, who oversaw the "Garbage Barge Revisited" installation with curator Karen Shaw.

TRASHY ART "So many artists are working in this medium today," says Shaw. "Sometimes it's a matter of money. You don't have to go to an art supply store. But making something out of nothing is also a statement -- part of the recycling movement. Use what is just going to be tossed out instead of consuming more stuff."

Among the 50 "Garbage Barge" artists for whom this has become their primary medium are Elizabeth Duffy, who creates birdlike medallion collages out of recycled pizza boxes. Tamiko Kawata collects the white tabs peeled off juice carton tops to fashion long chains that will hang from the museum gallery ceiling and spiral on the floor.

Viviane Rombaldi-Seppey constructs colorfully translucent panels -- "French doors," Shaw calls them -- out of plastic bag remnants. Michael Ensminger has assembled an installation out of pages torn from a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, while Keith Long shapes relief sculptures by reusing discarded pieces of furniture and wood.

"Art From Dross," indeed.

WHAT "Garbage Barge Revisited: Art From Dross"

WHEN | WHERE 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, noon- 4 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 2, reception 1-4 p.m. July 29, Islip Art Museum, 50 Irish Lane, East Islip

ADMISSION $3 suggested donation, islipartmuseum.org, 631-224-5402