About ten years ago artist Lee Tracy created a “big wall of bad news.” After graduating from the School of the Art Institute in 1989 she had channeled her love of nature into minimal, abstracted landscapes. Then she began reading about the state of the environment and ended up covering a wall of her studio with news clips, stories on endangered species and global warming. Tracy decided she couldn’t work in the “cozy cocoon” of a studio anymore. “As an artist, I thought I was connected to the world, then I realized I really wasn’t,” she says. “How could you make artwork about the world if you aren’t with it?”
Tracy, who’s 46, doesn’t try to make a living off her art. “I view money as one of the biggest conceptual works on earth,” she wrote in an essay on business strategies for the city-run Chicago Artists Resource Web site. “I so rarely see it.” Last year she started an online business, where, with the help of several part-time employees, she sells Certaintees, eco-friendly bamboo T-shirts whose designs are based on woodcut illustrations from the 1830s and 40s. A percentage of profits go to partnering nonprofits. “I thought, if I’m going to eat, what would I rather be selling, T-shirts or paintings? It does fulfill something for me in the message department. I don’t have to get it into a museum, I just have to get it on someone’s back.”
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Tracy started in Mongolia in 2004. She and her friend Patricia Evans, a photographer, flew to Ulan Bator, where they met a relative of Tracy’s who worked in the Peace Corps. Tracy bought nine 20-foot-long pieces of white fabric in the market and the three drove 12 hours through the steppes to the Onon River, near Siberia. “I thought I was going to see the last wilderness on earth, a place that feels like untamed nature,” she says. “But there isn’t any—it’s gone.” She soaked the sheets for a day and laid them out to dry. The fabric yellowed.
When Tracy’s friends traveled overseas—to England, Spain, Switzerland, and India—they took fabric and dipped it for her. Others have sent submissions from the Cache River in Woodstock, Illinois, and from as far away as Tibet and Thailand. Participants have dipped fabric in the Mississippi River at Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and in the Maroochy River in Queensland, the Volga in Russia and the Vrbas in Bosnia. In the Ivory Coast, 35 students from the International Community School of Abidjan dipped cloth in the Komoe River as part of a science experiment and then sent it to her. So far Tracy has collected swatches dipped in 35 rivers in 21 countries. Many hang from a rail that runs along the 14-foot-high ceiling of her studio.
“The more people eliminate their fears about something, the less they judge it—the less they want to kill it.”
