Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Revival Field

aahi0004102

Revival Field

full view

1991

creation

2009-03-09

Mel Chin (American, born 1951)

male

Mel Chin was born in Houston to Chinese parents in 1951, the first of his family born in the United States, and was reared in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood. He worked in his family's grocery store, and began making art at an early age. Though he is classically trained, Chin's art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. Alchemy, botany, and ecology are but a few of the disciplines that intersect in his work. He insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. Unconventional and politically engaged, his projects also challenge the idea of the artist as the exclusive creative force behind an artwork. "The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others' ideas to be realized," says Chin, who often enlists entire neighborhoods or groups of students in creative partnerships. In "KNOWMAD," Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic peoples facing persecution. Chin also promotes "works of art" that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science or rejuvenating the economies of inner-city neighborhoods. In "Revival Field," Chin worked with scientists to create sculpted gardens of hyperaccumulators—plants that can draw heavy metals from contaminated areas—in some of the most polluted sites in the world. Chin received a BA from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1990. He lives in North Carolina. (PBS Art21 Accessed 2008-02-06)

visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program, 2000

20th century

Contemporary

purification

restoration (process)

alchemy

lands (general areas)

plants (vegetation)

environmental protection

landfills

processes

landscape architecture

pollution

life

sculpture (visual works)

ecological art

sculptures and installations

landfill, chain link fence, six varieties of plants

60 sq ft.

Pig's Eye Landfill

site

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Collins, Judith. Sculpture Today. New York: Phaidon Press, 2007.

978-0-7148-4314-8

233

236

ISBN

© Mel Chin

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© Mel Chin

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