Guest Speakers

MEL CHIN

Keynote Speaker
Conceptual Artist ~ Burnsville, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Mel Chin was born in Houston in 1951. Chin’s art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. Popular culture and ecology, military specifications and hand made objects find collision and intersection in his work. Aside from the usual venues of gallery and museum he has placed art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even prime-time television. The expanding and contracting territory of art he continues to investigate is in service to the generational transfer of ideas.

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 enabled the birth of the scientific technology known as "green remediation" with hyperaccumulators — plants that can draw heavy metals from contaminated areas — to address the legacy of industrial pollution.

He continues to create critical aesthetic objects, paintings and drawings to bear witness to profound humanitarian and political tragedy.

He will screen his most recent production "9-11/9-11" a 22-minute short animated film at the Symposium.

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.