Students, Community Donate Plastic Lids for Townwide Art Project

Got any plastic lids hanging around? Then drop them off in one of 14 collection locations for the Flip Your Lid for Art project. By January, your lids and thousands of others will be doing their hanging around from the ceiling of the community center’s atrium.

Flip Your Lid is a joint venture between the Cranford-based Jersey Central Art Studios, the Cranford Environmental Commission, and the Cranford community center. Both an art and conservation project, Flip Your Lid will collect thousands of plastic lids, string them together, and hang them from the atrium in the community center.

“This is a fun thing where people can participate without needing to have any real artistic talent, and can get involved in recycling,” said Jersey Central Art Studios president Deb Leber of Orchard Street.

Leber said she first got the idea from seeing a similar project in Beachwood, Ohio.

“I’m always looking for art projects that incorporate other organizations and can get more of the community involved with creating art,” she said.

Flip Your Lid is in the collection phase now, and will be until the new year, due to the number of lids needed. In January, Leber will be looking for volunteers to help string the lids together. She plans to recruit from Cranford public schools and the Gill Senior Housing Complexes, all of which have collection stations, as well as the community at large.

Once the lids have been strung, they will be dangled from the ceiling of the Community Center. The installation will be the most difficult part of the process because Leber must rent a crane to hang the precariously-strung final product from the ceiling of the atrium. But despite the difficulty of installation, the atrium is the best choice.

“When you see these lids up and dangling in the light, it looks like stained glass, so we need that kind of light [that the atrium provides] to have the most effect,” said Leber.

Cranford is embracing the project. Although there is a collection site in Orange Avenue School, art teacher June Brown is motivating her sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders to get involved. She has promised to bake cookies for the class that brings in the most lids.

“This is all inspired by cookies. They are cracking me up,” said Brown. “It’s been great fun. I got a better response than I expected. I did it on a lark, and the kids have really gone with it and they’ve gotten real creative about it.”

She says some of her seventh-graders who are in a band have decided to hold a benefit show for Flip Your Lid. The price of admission? One lid. Though the kids have plenty of enthusiasm, they don’t yet have a show date as the drummer broke his arm.

Brown is unsure as to how many lids her students have collected, but believes that number is in the thousands. She said she is happy to help with the project because it combines two of her greatest passions: art and environmentalism.

“It was just something that spoke to me,” she said. “It’s conservation-related and it’s also art-related, so it really seemed like a wonderful thing. I love the community connection.”