Aftermath (2021) by artist Mark Cooper is an experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and pedagogy. Spearheaded by developmental psychologist and social activist Julia DeVoy, and public health researcher and long-time collaborator Dielle Lundberg, the work’s various components—including the landfill simulating reactors, the display armature, the Textile Waste Facts online learning modules, and the QR codes—have been sourced from an expansive network of scientific and design-based work executed by Boston College professors and students in disciplines as far-flung as applied psychology, art, engineering, environmental science and education.

The goal: to face up to a global economy of throwaway consumption that disproportionately pollutes countries in the Global South. The call to action: visit textilewastefacts.com or scan the QR codes throughout the sculpture to take a 30-minute crash course investigating textile waste as an environmental justice issue in the United States and globally. This course is designed to provide learners with the most important facts about textile pollution and to help them identify opportunities to change their own behavior and support systemic and structural changes.

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Aftermath proposes that the spaces art inhabits—whether gallery, studio, or classroom—have already begun to be polluted by spaces outside their sanitized, contemplative environs, from landfill to boutique store to laboratory. But Aftermath points to generative possibilities too, framing the museum as an experimental laboratory for forging cross-disciplinary and decidedly collaborative dialogues to help intervene in planetary crises, from uneven health disparities to environmental racism.