Compost Power Art Banners

My Interest in soil health and love of collecting food scraps for composting led me to an art banner collaboration with my friend and mentor Domingo.

Domingo Morales—founder of Compost Power, a New York City–based organization that builds accessible, sustainable compost sites across NYCHA campuses to empower local communities through education, job training, and mentorship.

I created a series of artwork banners for the Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront site. Installed July 2025 for Compost Power’s 5-year anniversary.

The banners supported a site tour with a potential funder—who later committed funding. They serve as a visual narrative for Domingo’s presentation and create an immersive and inspiring experience for attendees.

Hundreds of people pass the site daily! The banners invite anyone unfamiliar with Compost Power to learn more and become involved.

This project was written about in by the US Composting Council’s December 2025 Newsletter.

“If the vision only includes me, it isn’t big enough.”

-Domingo Morales, NY Times 2022
People working on a community project involving soil and mulch, with piles of dirt, shovels, wheelbarrows, and red buckets outdoors.
Compost Power team members posing together on a rooftop with city skyline and bridge in the background during sunset
Compost Power team member sifting finished compost for use in urban gardens.

The passion and tenacity exuded by the Compost Power team as they rotate the windrow mounds weekly inspired me to create artworks depicting the complexities and miraculous process local food scraps experience as they become nutrient rich matter for NYC’s urban farms and gardens.


A compost bin filled with decomposing food waste, including vegetable scraps, bread, eggshells, and spoiled flowers.
A large pile of compost or soil with leaves, plant debris, and organic waste, with people shoveling around it.
A watercolor painting of pink and orange flowers with green leaves on white paper, surrounded by paint supplies, a laptop, and art tools on a wooden table.
A painted mural on a fence showing an abstract landscape with trees, a river, and the New York City skyline with a bridge and tall buildings in the background, created by Lizette Avineri.
Illustration promoting River Street community composting with people collecting food scraps and compost piles, cityscape and bridge in background, composting logo, and text about accepted waste and drop-off times.
Fenced outdoor area with artwork and posters, city skyline in the background during sunset, sidewalk in the foreground.
Colorful outdoor painting of insects and plants behind a chain-link fence and barbed wire, with a city skyline in the background.


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“Diamonds and Gold and Food Scraps”

[image above] A freshly constructed compost windrow in the foreground of a pink toned Williamsburg bridge landscape. Collaged images of food-scraps and painted micro-organisms, mulch, branches and leaves mixed in combination with diamond imagery and rocks of gold to visually and conceptually narrate the value of compost in our social structure equivalent to the value we put on gold and diamonds. The pink and lime green tones of the background represent the contaminated city air only becoming more hot by uncovered, fresh food scraps- that if not composted otherwise end up in our landfill generating more methane into our atmosphere.

“Compost Magic”

[image below] Compost used in urban gardens and farms full of flowers, leafy greens and butterflies. This is the completed material outcome of the windrow composting process —Healthy soil is necessary for plants to be able to thrive and support biodiversity even in a city like New York and our food scraps are the main component to making this magic possible!