In this episode of the Art + Climate series on the Tech in the Arts podcast, hear from Sandra Goldmark, an Associate Professor in Theatre at Barnard College and the Senior Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School. A professor, designer, and entrepreneur, Sandra’s work focuses on the circular economy and regenerative climate strategy. She is the founder of Fixup, a New York City-based pop-up repair shop, and the co-creator of the Sustainable Production Toolkit for performing arts organizations.
In this conversation with AMT Lab Lead Researcher, Hannah Brainard, Sandra shares how her background in theatrical design has supported her career in “stuff” and offers tips for arts organizations considering reducing their impact.
Additional Links:
Sandra Goldmark: https://sandragoldmark.com/
Sustainable Production Toolkit: https://www.sustainableproductiontoolkit.com/
transcription
Hannah Brainard
Thank you for listening to another episode of Tech in the Arts, the podcast series of the Arts Management and Technology Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. The goal of our podcast series is to exchange ideas, bring awareness and stay on top of the trends. My name is Hannah Brainard, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m the lead researcher with AMT Lab. In this series, we’re exploring the intersections of climate and the arts through interviews with leaders across disciplines. We hope you’ll learn more about actions you or your organization can take toward a more sustainable future. Today, I’m joined by Sandra Goldmark, an Associate Professor in Theatre at Barnard College and the Senior Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School. A professor, designer, and entrepreneur - Sandra’s work focuses on the circular economy and regenerative climate strategy. She is the founder of Fixup - a New York City-based pop-up repair shop - and a co-creator of the Sustainable Production Toolkit for performing arts organizations.
Hannah Brainard
Sandra, thank you so much for joining us. It's such a joy to have you as a part of this podcast series.
Sandra Goldmark
Thank you for having me.
Hannah Brainard
Just to start off, I want to talk a little bit about your book Fixation, How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet. You use this line adopted from Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” - and, you've adapted this for materials, “have good stuff, not too much, mostly reclaimed, care for it and pass it on.” I'm wondering if you could give, sort of, your elevator pitch for this idea, and maybe talk a little bit about how it can be adapted for arts organizations.
Sandra Goldmark
Sure. I studied Michael Pollan's work and the food movement more broadly when I was thinking about stuff and consumption. Because I felt that the food movement is more advanced than what I call the “stuff movement,” which is still in its infancy. And by that, I mean people in this country, I think, generally have a notion that healthy food is important for your health and that what you eat also relates to the health of the ecosystem or the communities where the food is grown. And for me stuff, you know, clothing, couches, kitchen appliances, phones, all of those things are actually very similar to food. They come from the earth. We transform the resources of the Earth with the labor of our hands, and then we bring those objects into our home or in the case of food, put it into our body. And so for me, using the metaphor of food and the beautiful simplicity of Michael Pollan's phrase was a way that I hope to help make some of the challenges and opportunities of overconsumption in the U.S. more visible to my reader. It feels a little more accessible than saying, “we all need to transition to a circular economy.” And, I do think that just the way Michael Pollan argues for food, the steps are really very simple and very familiar to many people. And by the steps, I mean, the steps that I outlined. The steps to transitioning to a more sustainable and healthier pattern of consumption.
Hannah Brainard
Absolutely. And that's one of the things I loved, I listened to the audiobook of Fixation. And I love just your writing style, but how you make these really complex topics fun and accessible through some of the stories that you tell. One of the most vivid ones for me is at the very beginning of the book, you talk about your broken - what is it - your vacuum cleaner and backpack strap - and you have a newborn. As someone with a background in theatrical design, you're like, “I should be able to fix this stuff.” So that sort of led you to start Fixup. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that - the process of starting that and how your background in theatrical design helped inform that.
Sandra Goldmark
Sure. So it is true that around the time that I was starting the repair shops, which is Fixup. Fixup was a series of short term repair shops that operated in and around New York City that went on for seven years - I thought of just going to be one short-term project. But it's true that around the time I was starting to think about this, a bunch of stuff broke in my home, the vacuum the lamp, the I still have the broken lamp, right there a backpack, it's all true. And I had this newborn, so I was a little bit inundated with, you know, newborn stuff, as happens when you have a baby - get a lot of gifts, you have to, you know, reconfigure your home. And I started getting frustrated with how hard it was to get something fixed, especially the vacuum. There was no place in the neighborhood to take a vacuum. And I thought “this is crazy.” Because in theater, we would probably be able to fix this vacuum. Like let's say we had a vacuum in a show as a prop and it wasn't working, we would fix it and get it out on stage. Or at least be able to accurately diagnose it and say it's fixable, or it's not. So I knew the skills of this, too. I thought, why is it that, at this moment in time, these services which existed when I was little in New York, repair shops, are disappearing so quickly, when I know that it's possible? So my first instinct was to write a letter to Walmart and convince Walmart that they needed to open repair shops in the corner of every store. This was 2013, so I guess I was a little ahead of the curve. Walmart is now taking steps towards circularity. But my second idea, after realizing that changing Walmart's business model might take a little while. My second idea was to open a repair shop in New York. So we got an empty pharmacy, we hired a bunch of friends from theater - you know, a costumer, an electrician, carpenter - and me and my husband, we hired ourselves too. He’s a technical director, production manager, and I've been a set designer for many years. And we just opened our doors and started to see whether we could fix things, and whether people would show up.
Hannah Brainard
And they showed up.
Sandra Goldmark
They did. They literally stood in lines, and they would see us fixing something like a lamp or something else, and say, “Oh, you can do necklaces, you can do books, you can do this?” and go home, get a bag, and bring this bag full of broken items that I guess they'd been kind of hoarding in a corner of their apartment and get us to fix it. It was really funny.
Hannah Brainard
One of the things I love so much about that is the creativity that you have to show between fixing your necklace or a lamp or a backpack all of these different skills that align very well with a theater background. I'm wondering how the process of fixing sort of helped change your relationship with stuff and how it might help other people kind of look at their stuff a little bit differently?
Sandra Goldmark
I'd say that the repair shops for me helped me go a layer deeper into a practice that as a theatrical designer, I was already a little more attuned to stuff maybe than the average person. You know, my job was to create spaces, choose and make objects, put them on stage and use them to help tell stories. So I was very trained and primed to understand that objects hold meaning that they have value and that they can help define a world onstage. And what changed for me in the repair shop is realizing that in many ways, our objects are telling a story and defining our world offstage as well. And unfortunately, the story that we're telling in this country is, by and large, not one that I wanted to be part of. A story of waste. A story of increasing cheap objects made by people who are not necessarily paid a living wage, objects made with toxic materials. On and on and on. And I felt, you know, as a set designer who had filled way too many dumpsters with scenery, I felt like some of the ways that we thought about stuff and theater had to have value offstage. Our ability to fix things, our ability to see beauty and meaning in almost anything. And, of course, we're wasteful in theater, too. But there is a tradition in theater of frugality, of repair of finding beauty in the humblest objects, and I wondered what it would be like to take some of those theatrical practices out from backstage and sort of put them in the real world.
Hannah Brainard
And another project, perhaps in other projects, that you're working on close attention to some of the waste that's in theatrical design, I mean, looking at regional theaters - you create a new world on stage a couple times a year. And as you said, that can create a great deal of waste. So when one project that you have to create is the Sustainable Production Toolkit. I'm wondering, a little bit, how you get buy-in working with arts organizations to take on some of this sustainability work and looking at their materials use?
Sandra Goldmark
It's hard to get buy-in right now. It's getting better post-pandemic, from theater companies. I would say pre-pandemic, theatre companies were by and large, not really focusing on sustainability or climate impacts. You would hear, “Well, we're a very small industry.” Which true, you would hear a lot, “We're so busy. We don't have the money. Sustainability is more expensive.” There's a real bandwidth and time crunch and the American theater as we all know. And so those concerns were very real, I felt very strongly however, at least for me, personally, as a designer that I did not get into the arts, to contribute to a really broken harmful system. I got into the arts to be in conversation with the world around me, right? To be able to respond to the world and create plays that would help people think about this moment that we live in. And I felt that by sort of ignoring the climate crisis, which largely what was happening in our industry, I felt like we were not truly in conversation with the world around us. We were putting on blinders in a certain way, or putting our heads in the sand. I felt that very strongly. Now, this is not all theater organizations. There are so many amazing organizations and individuals who've been working on climate topics for a long, long time. But pre-pandemic when I'm working, you know, doing a lot of shows. Kind of steady show after show, by and large, it didn't feel like the industry was willing to tackle this. And I think that feeling of ‘no money, no time’ was so powerful and so prevalent and so real for so many organizations. My colleagues, Edward Morris, Mike Banta, Lauren Gaston and I tried, during the pandemic, to make the Sustainable Production Toolkit - to make a resource, a free resource, that might make it easier for people to start doing this work. We offered tons of workshops. We still do. And it's really our belief that once you take on this work, like - yes, it's hard, yes, theater people are overstretched. It's not necessarily going to add to your burden, and it might ultimately make some things easier. And the example I always really like to share is at Barnard, where I teach, we started really doing a lot of reuse. And we did it in order to reduce the amount of dumpsters we were filling. We were kind of obsessed with the waste. So we started leaning into reuse. And what we found was that it didn't impact our budgets negatively. We didn't have to spend more on materials. But we did have to shift some money from materials to labor, right? Instead of ordering a bunch of new plywood from Home Depot. We had to hire an extra person to, you know, rebuild this stock flat or pull something apart. And, actually, wound up being able to increase our fees. Our fees for designers, our fees for prop artisans, our fees for over-hire and extra carpenters, and that was something we had been trying to do unsuccessfully for years. So all of a sudden working on this problem of waste actually helped us with a major wage equity. And it's not always that wonderful. It's not always that easy. And sometimes it does cost extra money. But it's something I'd like to share with theater organizations to say that these issues are related. These interactive economies are related. And saying, “I don't have time for sustainability,” I don't think in the long run is actually going to help us deal with the complex state of our industry, and our art form.
Hannah Brainard
There's one line, I don't remember where it was in the book, but I've been thinking about it pretty much all week. You talk about, I think many people are hesitant to take individual action towards sustainability. And I hear it kind of a similar sentiment in arts organizations that, “well, we're not really the ones making the big impact. We're not like in the fossil fuel industry, we really need to put our attention there.” But kind of acknowledging that no matter what societal change is going to impact your daily life, your own habits. And so kind of taking a look internally is still important to the climate movement. Am I representing that correctly? I'd love to hear you talk about that.
Sandra Goldmark
Yeah, I mean, there's a sort of ongoing forever,little friction in the climate movement about individual action, does it matter? And I find the whole debate sort of pointless to be perfectly honest, of course, one person all by themselves deciding to buy a Prius or not use a plastic bag isn't going to change anything. But that, to me, is not the point of individual action, all the point of individual action is to for me is to personally get in alignment as much as I can, given the reality of where I live, my fenestration. Get in alignment with living in a way that feels right, that feels responsive to the historical moment that I live in, and then working with others to make changes in our community, in our organizations, in our theatre companies. And so, to falsely make the jump from saying one individual's actions don't matter on a mathematical level to then saying, as an organization, it doesn't matter what we do. That, to me, is doubling down on a false narrative. Because what we do as individuals, we could - fine, we can debate about that, whatever, it doesn't matter to me. But what we do is organizations, that's collective action. That is setting the tone, that is creating a culture in a workplace, that is one of the foundational building blocks of larger societal structures. And especially as a performing arts organization, or an arts organization where you are actively engaged in culture making and culture questioning. There are 110 reasons why any arts organization should start taking steps, even if they're small. And getting their operations in alignment with their mission. I just think at this point, it's, there's no excuse.
Hannah Brainard
I love that. Thanks for talking about that a little bit more. Looking into your background and your current work, you wear a lot of different hats. Outside of Fixup and the Sustainable Production Toolkit, you also are a professor at Barnard College and Columbia Climate School. And so I'm just curious, you talk about some of these little steps that organizations are taking - What projects are you seeing now that sort of excite you that you're a part of, or just that you kind of see taking place?
Sandra Goldmark
Gosh, so many. I feel like the landscape has changed so much from 2013, when I started the repair shops, to where I am now. And I will say that those tiny little changes I made in my life - another little plug for just taking action where you are - starting small and sharing it with people in your community has changed my whole life. As you said, you know, I started this journey, I was a theatrical set designer with a little bit of an obsession about garbage and repair, and a baby, two babies. And now I am still designing and teaching theater. But I also built the sustainability program at Barnard College, and I'm an Assistant Dean at the Climate School helping to design a whole school for climate. And my obsession about repair and reuse and garbage has turned into a really deep love and understanding of the circular economy. So I feel I've personally been transformed by this. And I feel very heartened by the difference in the tenor of the conversation around me. I feel like there's no - in 2013 there were still a lot of like, convincing people that this mattered or, you know, trying to get people on board - that feels different now. It feels more like everybody realizes that this is a big deal. People disagree about what to do. You know, there may be arguments, as we discussed before about the best scale or the best leverage point. But those are all really valid and important questions to discuss about how to cope with climate change. And so, I see so much. Like one of the most exciting things, you asked for a specific example, is I'm on the board of a theater company, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. And that company is really leaning into sustainability. It's now one of the core values of the company. They're designing a LEED Platinum campus, they're rewilding the golf course, which is their, their piece of land that they sit on. They're trying to make the concessions more sustainable. They have a sustainability handbook for designers, when they get hired. It's really been wonderful to see one small organization try to think broadly about this topic and how to engage seriously. And it's hard work, but they're doing it.
Hannah Brainard
I'm looking forward to looking more into that. That's fantastic.I'm pivoting just a little bit to talk more about sort of theatrical design, set design - something I'm curious about is the increase in tech in some set design. And in some situations, it may replace the need for materials or allow materials to be reused more, but also might have a greater energy use to create or repair. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are around that?
Sandra Goldmark
Yes, that's a really good question. High tech solutions, as you said, can sometimes decrease the need for materials like if, okay, we're going to use a projector and we have a white drop to project on. And therefore we're not going to do X, Y, or Z. But you're right, they can be more energy intensive in terms of the operations and some, and you also need to make sure if you really are trying to do that calculus, that you're actually are buying less materials, that you're not also buying a big plastic RP and then saying, “look how sustainable our projections are.” And then they're brought, you know, outside of theater, there's similar questions as we get into well, you know, digital tools have a footprint as well. An energy footprint and even a material footprint from all the servers and the hardware required to use them. So it can sometimes be a confusing analysis, and tough to do, maybe, for an individual show. I think, though, that a theater company that wanted to think about it, the easiest rule of thumb, is to understand that you need to look at the kind of embedded or embodied carbon. So that's the materials that you're buying and using. And you can use the five steps in my book to really reduce that just or just pull everything from stock. And then you also want to think about your operational carbon. So, your energy sources, how much energy you're using to run a show. And could you source your energy from renewable energy? So just the two basic structures of embedded carbon versus operational carbon can be a helpful way to at least start to get a handle on that.
Hannah Brainard
I was interested in an example from Barnard College, looking at reuse, you talked about using stock and how you assigned a financial value to the stock to help measure some of the impact. And I thought that was a really interesting approach as organizations start to think well, how do I even grasp what our impact is now? Could you maybe talk a little bit more about what that process was and how you measured impact that way?
Sandra Goldmark
Yeah, we started doing that. Again, we started from a place of “Agh, I don't want to fill any more dumpsters.” And then step two from there was well, we should just like, use all our props and make our sets out of garbage and make our sets out of stock flats. And then, we realized very quickly that we needed to have some sort of system in place so that every designer who came in was able to design sustainably and had some guidelines and some targets, not just like the one “greenie.” We realized the tool that we use to create guidelines and replicability in our production is the budget, right? Everybody knows this. If you exceed your budget, then you have to go in and you have to cut things. And so we realized that we needed to build sustainability into our budget. Otherwise, how would we track it? How would we hold a designer accountable? How would we make sure that it wasn't all left up to the production manager and the TD to like, make the set green through some magical thing? Not fair, and wouldn't work anyway. So then we thought, okay, we need to set reuse targets and track them somehow budgetarily. The problem was that we have a pretty good stock at Barnard, but we weren't tracking it in any way. We were just like most theaters, we would just like go grab something and stick it on stage. And it was almost like this secondary thing like, “Oh, we can't afford the beautiful Philippe Stark ghost chairs. So let's go get that, you know, gray plastic thing in stock.” So we wanted to flip that on its head, we wanted to show that our stock was incredibly valuable. We wanted to show our administration that it had a monetary value so that we could get more storage space and maybe some money for a person to take care of it. And we wanted to be able to set those targets. So we realized very quickly, we needed a dollar value assigned to our stock. Because otherwise it was like apples to oranges. We got, you know, $300 in lumber and ‘X’ square feet of used flats? Like you can't, compare volume or square footage to dollars. So then scenery was pretty easy. Like you could figure out how much something would have cost to make new and then that's the dollar value for that stock item. And props - we did this really funny thing where we we figured out how many props we had rented or bought new in a given season and kind of divided that by the total number of props and came up with a slightly random dollar value for every used prop. Now we don't always do it super accurately when we're budgeting. But we do give designers a target. We give them like ‘X’ thousand dollars new materials and ‘X’ thousand dollars used materials. And then we count the stock. We've now separated stock out, so we don't like tick down their used materials budget from stock, but we can track it. So we almost now have three lines. So this sounds maybe sounds confusing, as I talked about it without the visual in front of people. But it's actually very simple. In the real heart of it. However you want to structure it in your theater, the real heart of it is beginning to put a dollar value on those items that were previously kind of uncounted, unnamed, unvalued and, but actually are super, super valuable and are saving you thousands of dollars every year.
Hannah Brainard
It's fantastic.
Sandra Goldmark
And thousands of pounds of carbon.
Hannah Brainard
Exactly. And I love that it's an approach that you don't have to have, necessarily, an in-depth knowledge of the carbon emissions associated with the pencil or sword or whatever.
Sandra Goldmark
Totally, that was the other thing we wanted to avoid. Because we had looked at some of the tools. There's some great tools out there, Julie's Bicycle has some for carbon footprinting your show, and we love them. But we found that it wasn't realistic for us on a regular basis. And frankly, we didn't care like on a given show what the carbon footprint was of that pencil or that sword, we just didn't have time. So we just needed a broader lever, a broader tool to feel confident that we were reducing our carbon footprint and turns out reuse is that tool. If you can significantly decrease the amount of new goods you're buying and increase your reliance on used goods, you will reliably cut your embodied carbon significantly. And you don't need to therefore know how many metric tons of carbon your sword and pencil are emitting.
Hannah Brainard
I just have one final question for you. And that's actually a great place to start. So if an organization is considering to start taking action toward climate, or reducing their material use, what are some of the first steps that you would recommend?
Sandra Goldmark
The first step I would recommend is get your people together and talk about this topic and find out what issues are important to them. We really leaned into reuse and materials at Barnard because that was where we started from. Some other companies might really focus on energy, like you mentioned, maybe they want to look at their energy sources. Maybe they have land and they want to look at how they're, you know, treating the land or their facilities. Maybe they want to do some work with a local environmental justice community organization. There's a million ways you can start. I would recommend thinking broadly about all of these topics. But the first step is to get people together in a room and dedicate some time to talk about how you as an organization want to tackle this, and start setting some very preliminary goals - one or two or three changes that you think you can implement. And then go with it. And, just keep going.
Hannah Brainard
That's great. Thank you so much, again, for your time. I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I think it'll be so meaningful to arts administrators, kind of considering this work.
Sandra Goldmark
Thank you. I really appreciate your asking. I guess, to all the arts administrators and artists out there, it is so exciting to see change really coming to our industry. I just want to applaud everybody who's doing it and hope that they can use the toolkit as a resource, if it's at all helpful, and, share what they're doing because people are starting to do really exciting stuff across the country.
Hannah Brainard
Yeah, I agree. I think reading about it, it just helps inspire more change. So that's great.