December 6, 2024
Shira Lane strives to foster a creative, environmentally friendly Sacramento
Solving Sacramento
By: Justine Chahal
Today, Lane’s vendor market idea has evolved into Atrium 916, which she is the founding director of, located in Old Sacramento. Here, she aims to foster creativity and provide resources for artists in an effort to create a sense of community and advocate for a more environmentally-friendly Sacramento. “I’m always blown away by artists’ creativity,” Lane says. “I’m blown away by their capabilities, and I believe that if you bring together artists that have the same values, it’s like magic. If we could create a space that could attract artists with the same values of sustainability and community and kindness, imagine the things that we could do.” Lane founded Atrium 916 in 2021. It’s a nonprofit (legally under the name Up Kindness Inc.), creative innovation center for sustainability that provides resources to local artists. The organization partners with artists to sell their art both in-store and through its online marketplace, Lane says, with 70% of profit going toward artists and 30% towards the nonprofit. She added that artists can also potentially display their art at Atrium 916’s gallery for two months.
However, the art sold and displayed there must be environmentally friendly, made of repurposed material with packaging that can be brought back and reused, Lane says. Lane has always been passionate about the environment. As a child born in Australia who traveled back and forth between there and Israel where her mother is from, Lane raised horses and fostered animals, developing a close connection to nature.
She says she wants the Atrium to educate the public, including artists, on how to practice sustainability. The Atrium acts as a circular economy marketplace, where products are made from ecofriendly materials that can then be repurposed after being used for their intended purposes. Lane says she tries to do everything she can to help the environment, no matter how small the action may be. “How can we continue to have an economy that flourishes but just not design it stupid?” Lane says. “Right now, we’re on a linear economy which means we extract, use and dispose so we’re depleting our resources and having a heap of trash that we don’t know what to do with. We can design better.”