With apologies to writer/poet Eleanor Farjeon:

Art is anywhere, any street, any stair.
Under tires, hung from wires, in a valley, down the alley.
On lonely walls and made from dolls, cleaning teeth and up in trees.
With the car, in the yard, cut from books, with focused looks.
Anywhere! It doesn’t care! Art is anywhere.

O.R. Bête

Consider the dumpster. It’s just a big trash can, hauled in when a house is getting gutted, rented out to construction sites, left out back in semi-permanent residence to contain ongoing retail and restaurant waste.

Like garbage bins of any size, dumpsters live brutally utilitarian lives, out of sight and out of mind. I’m guessing the majority of us rarely engage with industrial-grade waste receptacles. Sometimes—like Boyd Roll-Off Services’ breast cancer awareness dumpsters—the big steel bins get a tiny moment to shine. That’s the exception; not the rule.

But, as we’ve already alluded-to in verse, if an object or environment can hold paint, be glued-upon or used to hang things from, performed in or danced-around someone will find a way to turn it into a venue for artistic expression. Big steel dumpsters are no exception … even if the audience for exhibition thereon is almost certainly random, and limited.

Let’s call the patrons of these al fresco galleries of chance the real deal, seekers, culture vultures. Not content with a curated-by-the-man experience of a trip to The Carnegie or The Warhol, feeling confined by the lower-expectations, but still-commercial ambitions of a first Friday in Garfield, the connoisseur de carnage digs deep behind buildings and circles sidewalk skips looking for that one elusive scribble, one perfect stencil, one perfectly-dripped spray-paint doodle.

Whether you, dear reader, fall into this exclusive, sneakin’ Sally down the alley, pungently-fragrant coterie, know that The Orbit will be there—poking retail backsides, circling the big bins, and capturing this momentary, transitory artwork … before it all gets thrown away.