Austinist Interviews Randy Jewart, Founder of Austin Green Art

If you'll be so kind as to glance at the image to your left, you'll note that Austinist is more than pleased to provide you with your daily phallic fix.

And now, to raise your mind from the gutter and elevate it to the highest heights, we bring you an exclusive interview with one of the major players at this weekend's TAFAF, or The Austin Fine Arts Festival. His name is Randy Jewart, and he is the founder of Austin Green Art. He just unveiled a work of sculpture at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, and he helped organize the Green Gates project, too. So please welcome Randy with open arms, and read on...

Who founded Austin Green Art (AGA)? When, where and why?
I founded Austin Green Art in November of 2004 with the support of the City of Austin's Art in Public Places office. We started as an environmental sculpture project and produced the city's first citywide outdoor sculpture exhibition, Green Wave, last June. Along the way we have broadened our scope to include all the arts! Imagine a regional artscene with environmental sustainability on par with aesthetic integrity. (Ed.: That's right! Just marinate on that for a minute!)

How did AGA get hooked up with the Austin Fine Arts Festival?
This year's event chair, Sharon Rodovich, invited us to propose one of our signature interactive installations for a new addition to the already rich program they produce. Luckily for all of us, the timing works out great to synergistically use the opportunity to expose 20,000 visitors to our Earth Day Green Gates project.

Are you a co-sponsor of the festival, itself?
We are just showing up with a big presence!

How many of your artists will be represented at the festival?
Austin Green Art will display all 20 or so of the artists' gate designs for Earth Day. A few of them will be on-site working on their projects, and some of them will be working with festival-goers who want to help out. We
hosted a design competition that was open to all ages last month at Gallery Lombardi and picked 20 of the 120 submissions we received.

I've read that your exhibit at the Festival will be interactive. Can you describe what it is, and how it will work?

Besides individual artists that you can work with, like Ian Cion, Future Man of Ideas (Ed.: Austinist thinks you should meet this guy, and report back), we will also be working with creative-types drawing on paper, digitally collaging designs which we will then output large-scale on recyclable plastic banners with eco-friendly inks. We also have been recycling full-sized highway billboards by cutting them up and reconstituting them as banners. Our whole enterprise is interactive -- we need help all month long with all aspects of these programs.