Mythos

I am an 📝Issue Driven Artist focused on creating 📝Conversation Generating Art to help build a world that works for all people and the planet. My mission: making environmental issues unforgettable.

Biography

Benjamin Von Wong (born 1986, Toronto) is a Canadian environmental artist and activist who builds environmental monuments — large-scale installations made from discarded materials that turn shocking statistics into unforgettable images. Based in Brooklyn, New York, he trained as a mining engineer at McGill University and left the industry in 2012 to make art full-time. His installations have appeared at five United Nations summits, the World Economic Forum, COP, and Art Basel, generating more than 8 billion impressions across 163 countries, and his work serves as foundational material in art classrooms around the world.

He holds a Guinness World Record for 📝Strawpocalypse, an installation built from 168,000 plastic straws, and created the four-story Giant Plastic Tap that stood at the center of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi when the Global Plastics Resolution was signed in 2022. His work has been narrated by Ryan Reynolds, and he has led campaigns with Nike, Dell, Starbucks, Greenpeace, and the Government of Canada — raising millions of dollars for frontline communities, often employing local talent and channeling resources where they matter most.

He was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2025 and serves on the XPRIZE Brain Trust. He is the co-founder of Awe.Exchange, a creative advisor to the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network and the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, and the founder of 📝Dear Crisis, a New York City community helping activists, artists, and everyday people navigate the metacrisis together through monthly salons, creative incubators, and collective action.

Selected Monuments

  • 📝The Thinker's Burden (2025) — installed in front of the Palais des Nations in Geneva during the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations; 5.5 billion impressions across 2,200+ news outlets.
  • 📝Biodiversity Jenga (2024) — a six-meter tower of 33 ecosystem dioramas built with 250+ collaborators for COP16 in Cali, Colombia; 1.2 billion impressions; now permanently housed in Cali's botanical gardens.
  • 📝Hand of Everest (2024) — built in Nepal from waste removed from the Everest region.
  • 📝Single-Use Hydra (2024) — created with Kiehl's on the New York City High Line.
  • 📝The Skull of Satoshi (2023) — commissioned by Greenpeace USA to spotlight Bitcoin's climate footprint.
  • Giant Plastic Tap (2022) — the four-story faucet at the UN Environment Assembly urging the world to "Turn Off the Plastic Tap."
  • Strawpocalypse (2019) — 168,000 plastic straws; Guinness World Record.
  • 📝The World's Tallest Closet (2018) — built with 📝Laura Francois at Cairo's Mall of Arabia from 3,000 items of clothing, representing a lifetime of fashion consumption.
  • 📝Mermaids Hate Plastic (2016) — a beached mermaid stranded on 10,000 plastic bottles, one person's lifetime of bottle waste.

Speaking & Consulting

Von Wong speaks and consults on creative campaign strategy — building marketability into a project from the planning phase, documenting the process so stakeholders worldwide stay invested, and designing participatory work that moves the public into inspired action. He has spoken at TED, TEDx, SXSW, and Dell World; his TEDxBoston talk, 📝Irrelevancy as Fuel to Generate Collective Action, distills the philosophy behind the work.

How I Work

  • I am happiest when working in collaboration with others that are thriving within their zone of genius.
  • I'm a divergent thinker that loves to absorb multiple perspectives. My ideas are the result of listening and asking lots of questions.
  • I conceptualize, design, build and market my campaigns from scratch, with the help of passionate individuals and hundreds of amazing volunteers. I know a little bit of everything, but am a master at nothing.
  • My art is less about the final product, and more about the process of bringing various stakeholders together to do something they've never done before.
  • I am predictive rather than reactive to problems that may arise during a project. This means that I'm constantly looking for, and finding problems with an idea. It doesn't make me very popular, but it is necessary!
  • I believe in creating work that is in service of all people and the planet.
  • I constantly think not only about what I want to do but how it's going to spread. A good story that isn't designed to be shared is a story that is being poorly leveraged.

This library is my external brain — the ideas, people, and frameworks I think with, made public so others can build on them.

Links & Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Von_Wong
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