Check out the amazing submissions we received for our 2021 Earth Day Art Contest that was centered around the theme “Restore our Earth.” Thanks to everyone who submitted!
The Winner:
“In landscaping our world, we have done her a great disservice by ignoring her natural forms. UT is located on the Blackland Prairie, a rich and massively important ecoregion that is severely endangered by our land practices. To save this ecosystem, we need to plant the native grasses and flowers that sustained it for millennia and manage them as the indigenous peoples of what we now call Texas did and continue to do. This piece is a call to action to transform our unsustainable lawns into a mosaic of diverse, biologically rich urban prairies.”
“The Earth and its wellbeing means so much to me, so I tried my best to represent that through a little doodle! To me, when I think of wolves, I think of nurturing because of the Romulus and Remus legend, where two kids were cared for by a she-wolf. I wanted to show humans relying on the life forms around us, not taking them for granted, and working with them in mind to restore the Earth to her healthy state.”
“In a literal sense, this piece shows an art restorationist restoring a painting of Earth. My intent behind the drawing was for the restorationist to represent humankind and how our hope is restoring our planet. We take initiative to combat the issue of climate change because we’re optimistic and believe our efforts aren’t for naught. Earth will have a bright future as long as we have bright-eyed people working towards it.”
“This piece shows a child cleaning the earth in her lap as the world around her is barren and destroyed. I chose a child because the younger generations are the ones that will suffer the effects of climate change if there is no effort to help restore the earth. She is trying to restore the earth herself, and you can see that the earth immediately around her is alive and colorful. It’s supposed to show that we can’t just sit and adapt to our earth dying around us, but we instead should try to clean and restore it.”
“I feel like I’m apart of the generation where more attention has been steered towards how we, as humans, can mitigate environmental damage and improve our life styles to secure our world. I imagine it as the past generations holding up the new generations to reverse the damage that has been done in our ambition to grow and live. The child is holding onto the hourglass that has the polar ice caps, which represents their melting due to global warming, and the cities, which represents us living within the modern society. The adult is holding and looking over the child and the hourglass to help the child understand the importance of choice; The choice to make the world a better place by balancing the need for resources, the environment, and accounting for time. The child holds the potential to flip the hourglass as with my generation and any other younger generations and make the Earth sustainable and better.”
“Gardening is something I do for a way to relax my mind and not worry about my struggles. This is a way to restore the Earth because it reduces carbon dioxide in the environment as well as increase oxygen. Something that can even help me being a student is that gardens or plants can reduce noise pollution, and this can help me when I am trying to focus on studies or homework for school.”
“This bucket hat was made out of plastic grocery bags. Using a technique called plarn, I created recycled string from an assortment of plastic bags I found at home, and then used it to crochet this hat. I think this piece fits well into this year’s Earth Day theme because producing yarn myself contributes to less textile production and plastic waste. Finding innovative and creative ways to combat the waste cycle is key to restoring our Earth!”
Campus Environmental Center 