Ithaca’s Monica Franciscus: Art on the road…to landfills

Local artist Monica Franciscus creates huge sculptures with repurposed plastic car bumpers, riveting our attention across the Ithaca area and beyond. Concerned about Climate Change, her early art (hanging on walls throughout this region, many states and abroad), is now eclipsed by gigantic, shiny, metallic, indestructible tower sculptures.

Twice recently, when transporting nine-foot towers to Oswego, NY and Worcester, MA, Monica was stopped by the highway police demanding to know “What is on the back of the truck?

Complaints were called in about odd scavengers with a towering form not securely tied down!”

We can assume Monica thoroughly indoctrinated the officers about throwaways turned into art and the scary expansion and demand for gigantic landfills.

Monica regularly visits a nearby auto body shop where she retrieves the plastic car bumpers otherwise headed to the ever expanding, towering landfills. She notes that cars are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases ratcheting up Climate Change. Summers grow increasingly hot, with forest fires, floods/droughts, erratic temperatures, and intense humidity around here, and more arid and dangerously hot temperatures in other parts of the world. Her plastic car bumper sculptures create vivid, symbolic reminders that the car industry, and the perceived convenience in our system and infrastructure have caused immeasurable harm with emissions, pollution, and trash.

Monica: “This tower is made with repurposed, plastic car bumpers which I get for free from a car body shop near my home in Ithaca, NY. I refuse to buy art supplies, given how much is produced and thrown away.”

“Regularly I pick up a carload of bumpers. Using a jigsaw, I cut the long pieces in half and trim the corner pieces, so they fit shingle-like, one overlapping the other using screws, washers, and nuts. The bumpers are colorful and are aerodynamic, highly engineered, designed to resist the elements – wind, rain, cold and heat. You can touch the piece. At the top, I place solar lights which represent ‘Sustainability.’

The light shines through the holes and gaps after dark.” “Over one hundred years ago, scientists knew the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere–that it heats the climate. When the car industry began in the U.S., passenger trains and trolleys were mostly done away with, ensuring dependency on cars and fossil fuel. Only 20,000 feet up from sea level is breathable oxygen into which we continuously add pollution. Now, the consequences of record high levels of carbon dioxide in the air are affecting our climate, weather, air quality, agriculture, our soil, water, and our health.”

“This tower is also about ubiquitous plastic, particulates (that are everywhere and in all of us), landfills, consumerism, materialism, robots in the workplace (with subsequent unemployment/poverty/inequality), collaborating corporations and politicians determining who builds what, and societies that prioritize profit at the expense of all life on Earth.”

“I was a painter, but continuing to make pretty pictures seemed irresponsible. Artists reflect the times. I wasn’t a sculptor and never thought I’d work with car parts or plastic, but the material, the industry, and the product very much represent some of the gravest issues facing our society, our democracy, our environment, and our survival…Car parts are perfect to make the point that fossil fuel burning machines need to be replaced by a sustainable alternative.”

Monica’s work is getting attention. “Throughout the year, I have shipped out my environmental work for varying periods, to several venues, on loan. Currently,  I have three 9’ towers out on loan: at SUNY Oswego for three years, at the Sage Community Art Center in Sheridan, Wyoming for a year, and another at the Oxford Library in Worcester, MA through December 2025 (after which it will go to The Discovery Museum in Acton MA, on indefinite loan.). The Amelia Park Children’s Museum has requested the Tower on loan as well.”  

“In May, 2025, I was awarded a local Community Arts Partnership Strategic Opportunity Stipend grant to help cover costs for a sculpture proposal. Later that month I was invited to be in Resilience: Art for a Sustainable Future at the Jill Stuart Gallery on Cornell University campus…A large square sculpture was shown at the Cooperative Gallery 213, in Binghamton, NY in July.”

This year, Monica was designated a member of the Climate Artists Group in Berlin, Germany. 

She was invited to give a talk in Sheridan, Wyoming, at the SAGE Community Art Center in October.

For more information regarding Monica’s early work, and her conceptual sculptures: (607) 229-9878, website: Artbymf.com, Instagram: @worksbymonica.