Public lecture:
Wednesday, April 22, 2015, 7pm
Hunter College
Lang Recital Hall, 4th floor, Hunter North
69th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues
New York, NY
The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Mel Chin, the Spring 2015 Zabar Visiting Artist, Wednesday, April 22, at 7pm in the Lang Recital Hall, located in the Hunter North Building, entrance on East 69th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan.
Mel Chin was born in Houston, Texas and began making art at an early age. He is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. He developed Revival Field (1989–ongoing), a project that pioneered the field of “green remediation,” the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. A current project, Fundred Dollar Bill/Operation Paydirt, focuses on national prevention of childhood lead poisoning. Chin is also well known for his iconic sculptures, works that often address the importance of memory and collective identity, and for inserting art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. His work is exhibited extensively in the US and abroad and was documented in the popular PBS program, Art 21: Art of the 21st Century. Chin is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including four honorary doctorates. A monograph of the installation, The Funk & Wag from A to Z, was published by the Menil Collection and distributed by Yale Unversity Press in 2014, and a traveling retrospective exhibition of his work, titled ReMatch, opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art in February 2014.
About Zabar Visiting Artists Program
Since 2007, the Zabar Visiting Artists Program has allowed Hunter College to bring internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with the top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work, engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, and with Hunter’s broader student community and the general public. Past Zabar artists have included: Robert Barry, Julie Ault, Charles Gaines, Doris Salcedo, Walid Ra’ad, Janine Antoni, Elizabeth Peyton, Jeff Koons, Gabriel Orozco, Glenn Ligon, Peter Doig, Vito Acconci, Tracey Moffatt, Carrie Mae Weems, William Pope L., Christian Marclay, Shahzia Sikander, Kerry James Marshall, Fred Tomaselli, Alfredo Jaar, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Pfeiffer, Joan Jonas, Nari Ward, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Wangechi Mutu.
