What to Know
- "CANstruction" is on view through Nov. 14, 2021
- Trademark Brewing at 233 E. Anaheim Street in Long Beach
- Choose your favorite "CANstruction" by leaving a canned good in the bin next to your favorite installation; Food Finders is the beneficiary
Stacking one canned good atop another canned good inside your pantry or cupboard?
It's going to take you a couple of seconds, if you set a timer just to see.
But stacking thousands of canned goods, in a colorful and quirky display, one that has a bit of fanciful flair, is going to take several hours, and plenty of planning, and more than a little creative moxie.
Get Southern California news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC LA newsletters.
Several Long Beach locals displayed that moxie and creative know-how as October ended and November began, all to participate in CANstruction 2021.
The annual eye-catching, spirit-lifting event is now on vivacious view, through Nov. 14, at Trademark Brewing in Long Beach.
How it works: Volunteers created large-scale artworks out of a considerable amount of donated canned goods.
But wait: These towering installations aren't simply the stacks of shiny, label-covered cylinders you see at the end of a grocery store aisle; rather, they've taken on various spectacular shapes.
Past years have seen the prodigious piles of canned goods pay happy homage to giant rainbows, sizable cereal boxes, and behemoth bubblegum machines.
A host of companies, from S&W Beans to Goya, donate food to the project, but so do regional organizations, and anyone who wants to contribute to the creative and kind-hearted effort.
And those donations continue, even as the artworks stand completed for this year. If you'd like to see these unusual and beneficent can-tastic towers in person, arrive with a canned good, or perhaps a few, and "vote with a can" for the installation you like best.
There will be a bin next to each piece, and you're welcome to choose your favorite CANstruction by placing the canned good you arrived with inside the box near the artwork that caught your fancy.
After the show has wrapped, all the cans within the installations, as well as the canned goods left by visitors, will be donated to Food Finders, an organization that has been "rescuing food and reducing hunger in Southern California" since 1989.
CANstruction is free to visit, no entry fee required. But do remember to show with some canned goods, if you can.
Would you like to join a build team down the road, or get involved with the 2022 project? Sweet: Here's where to learn more.
