Belo: Canada's Artist with a Cause

Canadian artist Belo does things big. He's an up and coming artist generating quite the buzz (at least I think so).

Like many artists, Belo's art comes with an important message (famous street artist Banksey comes to mind). Belo makes beautiful things to help protect all the beautiful things around us, is how I like to think of his art.

Case in point, a 66,000 cup, 3,600 square foot water mosaic Belo created to draw attention to the lack of access to clean water that plagues much of the world:



Then there is Belo's "Citizen Tree" - another massive art piece Belo created in a parking lot using 100,000 public transit passes to draw attention to the negative impacts cars have on our lives:



Belo's work in progress at the moment is the "Guardian Tree" being built as part of Greenpeace's #StandforForests campaign, an awareness project to protect Canada's Boreal forests (those are the big ones in the North) from reckless clear-cutting.

No cool video on the project yet, but here's some images someone sent me:



In this one, you can see that he's added all the names of people, something like 50,000, who signed on to support the project:

Photo credit: Robert Wagenhoffer


What do you think? Have you ever heard of Belo?