Mel Chin | “Paydirt”
EXCLUSIVE: Mel Chin describes the origins and motivations behind the nationwide art project Paydirt in a keynote address to the 2008 National Art Education Association Convention, and visits multiple sites in New Orleans adversely affected by both Hurricane Katrina and lead contamination in the soil.
New Orleans is the second most lead contaminated city in the United States. Discovering that “the disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” Chin felt he had to do something about it as an artist. Speaking before a crowd of thousands of art educators from across the country, Chin recounts, “I remember standing in the ruins of the Ninth Ward and realizing as a creative individual that I felt hopeless and inadequate. And I was flooded by this terrible insecurity that being an artist was not enough to deal with the tragedy that was before me.” Thus Paydirt, and its sister initiative, the Fundred Dollar Bill Project was born.
Fundred focuses on the creation of three million artworks (personal drawings based on the likeness of a one hundred dollar bill) by children across the United States. These artworks, a collective creative action, will be delivered to Washington D.C. to raise awareness and funding for Paydirt. Ultimately Paydirt intends to heal the environmental impact of years of pollution on a city-wide scale. As Chin explains:
Art21 and Mel Chin’s “Fundred” team in overdrive at NAEA
Last month, Art21 and Mel Chin (Season 1) took arts educators from around the world by storm as they presented two of the most dynamic sessions the National Arts Education Association’s annual convention had to offer.The professional development session, presented by Kelly Shindler and Mel Chin, was standing-room only. Teachers were treated to a special presentation about Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project by Mel Chin himself. The following day, the Art21 Super Session was also packed with educators. After creating their own works of “Fundred Dollar Bill” art, teachers headed out to the street for a dramatic suprise entrance of the Fundred Project’s armored truck (pictured above), which runs on cooking oil supplied by school cafeterias.
Here on the left coast, plans to present the Fundred Dollar Bill Project to California’s educators are already underway through partnerships with local museums, KQED’s Spark program, and the Fundred Project’s national director.
Be sure to check out Art:21’s video of students who have already participated in the Fundred Dollar Bill Project and, if you’re an educator, help your students create their own Fundreds for donation to a neccessary and worthy cause. More information can be found on the project’s Web site, www.fundred.org. Password = Paydirt.
Art21 & Mel Chin at NAEA
Check out Art21’s photos from last week’s NAEA conference in New Orleans. Featured are Art21-featured artist Mel Chin’s SuperSession, Art21’s professional development workshop for teachers (coopted by Chin), and Art21 and Mel’s team on the ground around town.
Art21 and Mel Chin at NAEA in New Orleans this week
We’re heading down to New Orleans tomorrow to present a few sessions at this week’s National Art Education Association conference at the Morial Convention Center. In addition, Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be joining us to unveil more details on the Fundred Dollar Bill project and the bills themselves. Those educators in New Orleans for the conference can find Mel and Art21 at the following presentations. For those of you who can’t make it, our friend at KQED’s Spark and co-presenter of the Contemporary Art Film Salon, Kristin Farr, and I will be blogging both the onsite conference activities and offsite investigations with Mel and his team.
NAEA Convention, New Orleans, LA - March 26-29, 2008
Thursday, March 27 2:00pm - 2:50pm
Art:21 and the Educator Workshop Model
This session shares findings from Art21’s professional development work with teachers to support the integration of contemporary art and artists into curriculum using inquiry-based learning strategies and connections to thematic strands.
(Convention Center Room 201)
Friday, March 28 1:00pm - 2:50pm
Super Session with Mel Chin | For Your Eyes Only: An Operation
Mel Chin is a conceptual visual artist motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances. He works in a variety of art mediums to calculate meaning in modern life, placing art in landscapes, in public spaces, and in gallery and museum exhibitions, and more. Chin says, “Making objects and marks is also about making possibilities, making choices—and that is one of the last freedoms we have. To provide that is one of the functions of art.”
(La Louisiane Room)
Saturday, March 29 10:00am - 6:00pm
Art21 and Spark Present the Contemporary Art Film Salon
The Contemporary Art Film Salon is back! Take a break from the workshops to view films from the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century and SPARK* television series, as well as other acclaimed documentaries on contemporary art and artists. Produced by Art21, KQED’s Spark, SFMoMA, ICA Boston, and Illuminations, these films are accessible and valuable resources for exploring the artists of today and their sources of inspiration. Films are 10-30 minutes each, grouped in 1-hour thematic programs.
(Convention Center Room R09)
Look forward to performance, activities, and special guests. If you are in town, be sure to join us. If not, we’ll be posting lots of video and photos when we get back.
All About “Fundred” | Interview with Mel Chin part 2
The following conversation concludes Art21’s interview with Season 1 artist Mel Chin about his national collaborative artwork, Paydirt/The Fundred Dollar Bill Project. Read Part 1, published last Friday, here.
ART21: Take us to the next step. You’ve talked about the collection but talk about the next part—what happens after the collection? Once the truck leaves North Carolina, what happens?
MC: No, we’re going to start in New Orleans. We’re waiting till we have [$300,000,000 Fundred dollars, the amount equivalent to the cost of the landscape project]. The car will leave New Orleans and go through this 15,000-mile, maybe even 20,000-mile drive, slowly across the country, with a team of relay drivers and a chase car and a video camera that will be passed to the next team.
They’ll stop at schools [Collection Centers]; they’ll pick up the artwork and respectfully catalog it. So eventually [the armored truck] will work its way around this very strange route because, again, it’s based on the way people are scattered. Finally, it will roll up to D.C., where we will stop at the Federal Reserve and ask for even exchange first. I have it from inside sources the Federal Reserve will probably not give us even exchange. That’s inside sources only. But then we’ll take it to the steps of Congress. We’re there to ask for an even exchange, and not necessarily just cash, but for processes that we think will probably cost this much to transform a city in need. And if we transform that city in need, its gift back will be the cure for cities all over America that have this problem.
Billions have already been spent in New Orleans and trillions are spent on the war. The cost we’re talking about, if you want to go the negative way, is one day in Iraq. But it’s also the cost of that bridge over the Mississippi or five cloverleaf interchanges. So if you think about it as an engineering project, it’s trivial, really. It’s trivial. Offset is what’s important to Congress.
All About “Fundred” | Interview with Mel Chin part 1
The following interview with Season 1 artist Mel Chin took place in late February 2008 at Art21’s offices. Part 2 will be published on Monday. Stay tuned for further information on Mel Chin’s presentations at next week’s National Art Education Conference in New Orleans, LA.
ART21: Could you explain how the Fundred Dollar Bill project came about, what it is, and what “Fundred” means?
MEL CHIN: I was in Houston, and I ran into a good friend, Rick Lowe, who said, ‚Äúwe‚Äôre going to New Orleans to do something.” It was six months after Hurricane Katrina. He was talking about the New Orleans Biennial. And I remember telling him, “that‚Äôd be great.” But half the population was gone. I was thinking about art from a community point of view, as Rick does. We had an interesting conversation about it. I said to Rick, “let‚Äôs go.” Rick and I were part of discussions with Transforma Projects, arts people from all over the country that met in New Orleans to come up with a response to the tragedy. So we toured and we looked, but we mostly conceptualized about what we could do.
So the project really came about this way. I was in the Ninth Ward, and I was overwhelmed. There was no more water, but I was flooded with an emotional and psychological response that was uncommon for me as a creative person. I felt hopeless, because I felt there was nothing I could do.
Then, you had the debris and the evidence and the remains of who knows what? I don’t know. And no one else knew, either. And so I left. I remember going to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to receive an honorary degree. I didn’t want to go, because I felt compelled by the tragedy of this magnitude to move into really dramatic action, but I didn’t know what I could possibly accomplish. Whatever it was, it had to be meaningful.
