Treecycling for Art

That time of year has come and gone.

Michael Neff's Flickr

The gifts are given and received, the parties attended, and we’re all finally tired of holiday music.

By now, you’ve no doubt noticed the disregarded, bygone Christmas trees littering the streets of Williamsburg, and the truth is, there are many different ways to get rid of them. You can leave them for curbside collection, mulch them, or even feed them to rhinos, but local artist Michael Neff has his own plan.

Neff and a friend collected the fallen and forgotten firs around the neighborhood, and hung them in all their dry and dying glory under the BQE. There they swing and sway as the wind blows, and cars pass overhead.

According to Neff’s Flickr,

A proposal to install at a Brooklyn gallery this year was well received but they wanted more time to publicize the installation and asked me to install it for them next year. I wanted to do something immediately so I identified potential venues for installation and settled on this location under the BQE because of its visibility, ease of access, and the amount of traffic it gets.

The installation is located where Metropolitan Avenue crosses North 6th Street.

I have been intending to do an installation piece using the discarded Christmas trees for a number of years now. They begin to crowd the sidewalks of New York City as soon as the day after Christmas and have always felt a bit sad to me.