The Red Cup Project is holding a design competition starting this week to promote its mission and draw awareness to the environmental effects of littering.

The upcoming competition calls for design entries for the group’s latest art installation, submitted either individually or in teams. After the winning design has been chosen, project members will go out and collect red cups around the campus, cleaning them and transforming them into art.

“We feel these issues need to be talked about,” said co-founder Kate Chesebrough. “There is a lot to say locally, regionally and nationally what is waste and what can be done about it.”

Founded in 2014 by Leslie Baz, a fifth-year senior architecture major at Syracuse University, and Chesebrough, a senior landscape architecture major at ESF, alongside two other students, the Red Cup Project creates art projects out of red cups they find around the campus. The group’s installations have been seen around campus and along Euclid Avenue.

Submissions for the competition will be accepted until March 6, and the winner will be announced on March 20, according to the group’s Twitter page. The winning design will receive a cash reward. Members of the Red Cup Project will build the winning installation, and it will later be unveiled in several locations around campus, including at Earthfest, an event hosted by Students of Sustainability.

Grown out of a class assignment given by professor Lori Brown at the SU School of Architecture, the project grew into a way to promote awareness about wastefulness, dangerous drinking and more.

“It grew much more past being just a class assignment,” Baz said. “It was at the time when we received the No. 1 party school ranking, and it was a hard topic at the time for the administration to deal with.”

The students took the concept of partying and applied it to art, building installations from the mass quantities of plastic cups found strewn around the campus on the weekends.

“It’s significant in a lot of ways to different people: we are actually picking up disposed cups and re-using them and cleaning the street,” said Baz, “but the other side to it is calling awareness to binge drinking and alcohol awareness.”

The sheer number of cups collected, and the importance of the work in the community have impressed participants of the Red Cup Project’s recent cleanups. Julia Jesse, a member of Students of Sustainability and a freshman in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, said the group’s events have helped raise awareness about environmental issues.

“It helps keep the community cleaner, but it also makes the community aware of how much they litter and that they should be recycling,” Jesse said.

Published on February 10, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Hanna: hrhorvat@syr.edu