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Can Collectors Get 'Pimped' Shopping Cart at Williamsburg Redemption Site

By Gwynne Hogan | April 5, 2016 5:25pm

EAST WILLIAMSBURG — You can pimp your ride, pimp your room, but how about your shopping cart?

This Saturday, a group of artists will team up with local can collectors to adorn the shopping carts they use to collect cans as part of an art project called Pimpex, which is being hosted by Sure We Can, a nonprofit redemption center for can collectors at 219 McKibbin St. near Bushwick Avenue.

Silvia Xavier, 27, a Brazilian graduate student, studying Urban Ecologies at the New School Urban Ecologies, was inspired by the work of Brazilian artist Thiago Mundano who has organized “Pimp My Carroca [cart]” events in cities across Brazil. Xavier said she’d interviewed many can collectors there whose decorated carts led to tangible benefits, she said.

They turned heads and made people recognize them when they used to be ignored and helped them build relationships with local businesses and residents, she said.

"The cart works as an intermediary between people," Xavier said. 

Just three collectors took Xavier up on her offer for a decorated cart she funded through a successful Indiegogo campaign. That's despite the fact that dozens of collectors drop in at Sure We Can's redemption center each day. She’s hoping that Saturday’s event will inspire other collectors to want to get involved with future Pimpex events, she said.

Four artists will participate in Saturday's cart decoration, including Umesh Mangipudi, 37, an Indian artist who said the project made him think of his experiences in Mumbai when he converted a room in an abandoned building into a studio and began crossing paths with other squatters who lived on the fringe of that city's society.

The mobility and public nature of a cart is different from creating work "in isolation; you just paint something in your studio and it hangs in a gallery," he said.

“I like something more interactive with a cause [that creates] dialogue with people," said Mangipudi

One of Sure We Can's cofounders Eugene Gadseen, 58, a can collector since the 1980s is one of the three collectors getting a revamped cart this Saturday.

"I'm excited to get to see how it's going to turn out... Just to see how a shopping cart can be changed into something different and better," Gadseen said, adding that he thought people would recognize his cart better with a signature decoration of some kind, especially if he lingered for too long inside of a store. "[When they] pass by, they would know that's Gene's cart."

While Saturday's Pimpex, which starts at 11 a.m. and is open to the public, is the only one planned, Gadseen said he thought his decorated cart might inspire other collectors to get involved with Pimpex in the future.

"They could see what it's like," he said. "I'm quite sure that more people would take to it."