On a stretch of Oregon coastline near the small town of Bandon, the Pacific Ocean has a habit of giving things back. Flip-flops, bottle caps, fishing floats, toothbrushes, toys, tires, disposable lighters — the tide delivers them in endless, colorful heaps, a necklace of human carelessness stretching along the sand. For most people, it is simply litter. For Angela Haseltine Pozzi, it became the raw material for a new life, and eventually, for a traveling exhibition that has now landed in the heart of the Midwest.
Through September 14, Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in Saint Paul is hosting Washed Ashore: Art to Save the Sea, a free outdoor exhibition of ten larger-than-life sculptures of marine and coastal wildlife, each one constructed entirely from debris collected from beaches and waterways. The sculptures are scattered across the zoo grounds, inviting visitors to wander among a bull shark, an African penguin, a humpback whale tail, a sea jelly, a sea lion pup, a rainbow parrotfish, a bald eagle, a salmon, a sea turtle, and a puffin. Up close, the effect is both beautiful and unsettling: a sea turtle's shell built from bottle caps, a penguin's body stitched together from plastic fragments, a shark's teeth made from what look like discarded toys.
The exhibition is the work of Washed Ashore, a nonprofit project of the Artula Institute for Art and Environmental Education, founded by Pozzi in 2010. Since then, the organization has built more than 66 giant sculptures from over 17 tons of ocean garbage, with help from more than 10,000 volunteers who have collected, cleaned, and processed the debris. The organization's mission is to bring awareness to plastic pollution through art and encourage responsible consumer habits.
But the story of Washed Ashore begins long before the first sculpture was assembled. Pozzi, an artist and educator for over three decades, came to Bandon in 2007 under circumstances that would have broken many people. She had just lost her husband of 25 years, photographer Craig Pozzi, to a brain tumor that went undiagnosed for years — a tumor that doctors had repeatedly dismissed as panic attacks. After his death, a malpractice lawsuit resulted in a jury award, and she retreated to the place where her heart had always lived: a lake near Bandon, where she had spent blissful childhood summers at her family's cabin.
Walking the beaches of Bandon's rugged shoreline, Pozzi was struck by the sheer volume of plastic washing ashore. The garbage became a metaphor for her own grief — the emotional debris of a life that had delivered, as she put it, "Dumpsters full of emotional garbage." She began collecting the trash, and with the help of anyone who stopped by her studio, she started turning it into art. Her husband had once asked her, admiring her craftsmanship, "But what's the point?" Now she had an answer.
Pozzi's approach is deliberately hands-on and community-driven. Volunteers gather debris primarily along the southern coast of Oregon, then bring it to workshops in Bandon, where they drill holes through plastic pieces and stitch them to wire mesh. These panels are later fastened by Pozzi and her team to welded steel structures, creating sculptures that are as sturdy as they are striking. The process is painstaking, but the results are monumental. At Como, the centerpiece is Natasha the Sea Turtle, measuring 11 feet long and weighing approximately 1,200 pounds. Nearby stands Rosa Bald Eagle, which rises 9.5 feet tall and stretches 17 feet long, depicting an eagle pulling a fish from the water — a reminder that plastic pollution does not stay in one place, but moves through waterways and enters the food chain, affecting wildlife far beyond the shoreline.
Each sculpture is accompanied by educational signage that explains the environmental impact of plastic pollution and offers practical steps visitors can take — reducing single-use plastics, reusing what they can, recycling properly, and keeping trash out of storm drains.
The choice of Como Park as a venue is fitting. Admission to Como Park Zoo and Conservatory is free, with voluntary donations appreciated. The Washed Ashore exhibition is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a legislative appropriation from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
For visitors, the experience is equal parts wonder and reckoning. Children may delight in spotting familiar objects embedded in the sculptures — a recognizable bottle cap, a stray flip-flop, a fragment of a beach toy — while adults may find themselves confronting the scale of the plastic crisis. The sculptures are beautiful, surprising, and a little heartbreaking. They are also a testament to what can happen when grief is channeled into purpose, when a community comes together to clean a coastline, and when art refuses to look away from the mess we have made.
Washed Ashore has traveled to zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens across North America, including SeaWorld parks, the San Francisco Zoo, the Virginia Aquarium, and the Oregon Coast Aquarium. But its power remains rooted in the simple, startling act of seeing trash transformed into a whale's tail or a puffin's beak — and realizing that every piece of that trash was once someone's careless discard.
As the exhibition's signage reminds visitors, every piece of trash picked up and properly disposed of is a piece that will not cause harm to local environments and animals. At Como Park this summer, the message is impossible to miss: the ocean's garbage has become a mirror, and what we see in it is ourselves.