Have you ever thought about what to do with your used Metro cards rather than just throwing them out? One woman has opted to use them to produce pieces of fabulous art!
I am going to let you in on a part of my life – when I lived in Montreal for a few years, I used to keep the Metro cards to ride the subway, partially because you never knew when a Metro security guy would be coming on to check if you had one, and partially because I had a fascination with them. Not only did I like to look over the time/date stamps and try to remember where I had been, but I thought that maybe I could make a cool collage out of them. The truth, however, was that they just sat and piled up, doing nothing more than taking room in my backpack. When I left Montreal and moved back home, I found them all and proceeded to throw them out.
Well, one woman had the same idea as me with Metro cards from the New York subway system. But unlike me, she actually turned these subway cards, which you can find littered all over subway floors as well as on the sidewalks, and turned them into beautiful pieces of art.
Nina Boesch, a 33 year old artist, spends hours every day, cutting up the train cards and then piecing them together like a puzzle to create a fantastic piece of art, including portraits of famous faces, landscapes, and other great things.
In total, Nina says she has cut over 30,000 Metro cards and will freely admit that she got a lot of them by scouring the stations throughout New York City. According to Nina, “I can’t leave a subway station without looking around, it’s almost OCD at this point. Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a whole stack of them. My friends and coworkers collect them for me and donate them for my hobby.”
Well, it is a great way to recycle!
Art these days can be made out of just about anything including portraits made from pages of the phone book or lots of socks!
