As an artist who preferred to play with scale, Debby Lee Cohen created monumental items, like the enormous puppets she designed for Manhattan’s annual Village Halloween Parade, in addition to miniatures, just like the tiny forest she as soon as made for a piece by the interdisciplinary artist and compose Meredith Monk, with whom she usually collaborated.
A decade and a half in the past, she grew to become a plastic activist when she discovered the dimensions of waste in New York Metropolis’s public colleges.
Her daughter Anna, then in second grade at a college within the East Village, had introduced that she was boycotting lunch after seeing an exhibition on local weather change on the Museum of Pure Historical past that included a diorama of polar bears atop a mountain of what she acknowledged as her faculty’s lunch trays. It was then that Ms. Cohen discovered that faculty lunches had been served on foam trays — and that the town’s greater than 1,800 public colleges had been utilizing and throwing out no less than 800,000 of them every day.
Ms. Cohen, an artist, animator, performer, puppeteer and environmental activist whose marketing campaign to get rid of foam trays from New York Metropolis’s public colleges paved the best way for related bans within the metropolis and state — and who taught college students methods to advocate for themselves at college and at Metropolis Corridor — died on April 7 at her dwelling in Manhattan. She was 64.
The trigger was colon most cancers, mentioned her sister, Ellie Cohen.
In 2009, after her daughter’s faculty lunch boycott — which she solved within the brief time period by making her daughter’s lunches herself — Ms. Cohen seemed for organizations that had been coping with the tray difficulty. There have been none. However she discovered like-minded mother and father who had been additionally working to cut back the staggering quantity of plastic waste of their youngsters’s colleges, they usually banded collectively to push for citywide motion.
Their efforts led the town’s Division of Schooling to agree in 2010 to check out Trayless Tuesdays, a foam-free initiative that lower down the variety of trays utilized in public colleges by 20 %, or 850,000 trays, per week. They then labored with Stephen O’Brien, an administrator within the division’s workplace of meals and vitamin providers, to discover a compostable various.
Ms. Cohen’s college students in her 3-D class on the Parsons College of Design created a prototype with enter from public faculty college students — lots of whom had been adamant that the foam-free trays ought to nonetheless have compartments in order that completely different meals wouldn’t run into one another, that enduring childhood horror.
“Debby Lee was a terrific listener and a terrific storyteller,” Mr. O’Brien mentioned, “and she or he was very, excellent at understanding the necessity for incremental change once you wish to make large lasting change.”
By 2015, working with the City College Meals Alliance, which collaborated with 5 faculty districts throughout the nation to purchase compostable trays at a scale that made them extra reasonably priced, Ms. Cohen and the group she based, Cafeteria Tradition, had been profitable of their combat to ban foam trays from the town’s faculty system. They then set to work on pruning different plastic gadgets that make up a typical faculty lunch, like cutlery, single-use condiment packets, plastic wrappers and chip baggage.
In 2018, fifth graders at P.S. 15 within the Purple Hook part of Brooklyn took step one. Ms. Cohen and her colleagues, together with the college employees, developed a program that turned the scholars into citizen scientists. They studied the quantity of waste they generated, discovered concerning the dangerous results of plastics on the setting, and petitioned their principal for permission to strive a plastic-free lunch day.
The scholars then took on Metropolis Corridor, testifying earlier than metropolis officers about their expertise and asking for plastic-free lunches in all public colleges.
Ms. Cohen and the filmmaker Atsuko Quirk, Cafeteria Tradition’s government director, made a documentary in 2019 concerning the fifth graders’ odyssey. The movie, “Microplastic Insanity,” is an “Inconvenient Fact” for its instances. It concludes, joyously, with the scholars rallying at Metropolis Corridor and Ms. Cohen’s large puppets — comprised of foam trays plucked from the rubbish — gamboling on the steps outdoors.
Two weeks after the rally, the New York Metropolis Council handed a ban on single-use foam containers, and the legislation took impact the subsequent 12 months. A state ban was adopted in 2020.
Since 2022, 750 of New York Metropolis’s elementary colleges have participated in a month-to-month plastic-free lunch day. Twice a 12 months, in November and April, colleges throughout the nation take part.
“Debby Lee was a visionary who knew methods to get issues finished,” mentioned Judith Enck, a former official for the Environmental Safety Company and the founding father of the nonprofit group Past Plastics, who collaborated with Ms. Cohen and Cafeteria Tradition. “Once I get just a little blue considering we’re not making sufficient progress on plastic air pollution, I simply watch the trailer for ‘Microplastic Insanity.’ There are a lot of little Debby Lee Cohens on the market now who will do that work as soon as they graduate.”
Eric Goldstein, the New York Metropolis environmental director on the Pure Sources Protection Council, mentioned in an e mail: “Debby noticed the facility that college students might have in influencing elected officers as a manner of bringing about environmental progress. She introduced faculty children into Metropolis Council hearings. She arrange conferences for them with Metropolis Corridor officers. She was minting lifelong advocates who felt they’d the facility to affect public coverage.”
Deborah Lee Cohen was born on Aug. 23, 1959, in Baltimore, the youngest of 4 youngsters of Helen (Schlossberg) Cohen and Gil Cohen, a paper and chemical salesman. She studied biology at Goucher Faculty earlier than transferring to the Maryland Institute Faculty of Artwork, graduating in 1981 with a bachelor’s diploma in nice arts. She moved to New York Metropolis the subsequent 12 months.
Ms. Cohen designed units, puppets and costumes for plenty of administrators and choreographers, most notably Meredith Monk. “Debby Lee might create worlds out of quite simple issues,” Ms. Monk mentioned by cellphone. “We had been alike in our desire to work in a really tactile manner that was additionally rigorous and complicated.”
When Ms. Monk staged her cosmic epic “Atlas” on the Houston Grand Opera in 1991, Ms. Cohen created a number of props for the set — a horse, an airplane, an ocean liner and a jeep — that evoked journey as a metaphor for a non secular quest.
“She was additionally one of many nice diplomatic geniuses of our time,” Ms. Monk added. “Debby Lee was radiant and buoyant, and but she had a quiet energy.”
For practically a decade, Ms. Cohen designed the enormous puppets which might be the centerpiece of the Village Halloween Parade. She labored with the artists Mia Kanazawa and Mark Kindschi and a cadre of volunteers at Rokeby, the eccentric 600-acre property in Rhinebeck, N.Y., that has been dwelling to the parade’s preparations since 1980. It was Ms. Cohen who launched environmental themes into the spectacle, as an expression of each activism and pragmatism: The parade wanted sponsors.
In 1989, the theme was the rainforest. Ben & Jerry’s signed on and used the parade to introduce a brand new ice cream taste, Rainforest Crunch. Ms. Cohen designed puppets of rainforest animals in peril of extinction — the woolly spider monkey, the matamata turtle and the toco toucan — however rendered them as skeletons, save for one vibrant factor, just like the toucan’s sensible orange invoice or the monkey’s curling tail.
Along with her sister, Ms. Cohen is survived by her husband, John Molloy, a gallerist; their daughters, Anna and Maria Molloy; a stepdaughter, Leah Molloy; two grandchildren; and her brothers, Jay Wolf Schlossberg-Cohen and Jeff Cohen.
In 2018, Gale Brewer, who was then the Manhattan borough president, declared Dec. 12 of that 12 months “Debby Lee Cohen Day” in recognition of Ms. Cohen’s anti-plastic activism within the faculty system. Earlier than her demise, Ms. Cohen had been lobbying for the Packaging Discount and Recycling Infrastructure Act, which would cut back single-use plastics like chip baggage and bread wrappers. It was handed by the State Senate final week, however has not but been voted on within the Meeting.
Ms. Cohen was buried on April 10 at a pure burial floor in Rhinebeck. She was wrapped in an vintage French cotton sheet that had belonged to Ms. Kanazawa, her puppet colleague, and laid on a wood board from the Massive Reuse middle in Brooklyn, which resells donated gadgets that may in any other case find yourself in landfills.
She was adamant that her funeral be zero-waste — and package-free.
