Making Money to Rebuild New Orleans

Photo Submitted

Mel Chin

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Conceptual artist Mel Chin will return to campus to participate in the final stage of the Fundred Dollar Bill Project at the Fine Arts Gallery in the Fine Arts Center. An armored truck will be parked between the Fulbright Peace Fountain and Fulbright sculpture behind Old Main on Friday, March 12, to pick up the $100 bills people create to support an environmentally friendly rebuilding of New Orleans.

From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Fine Arts Center Gallery will be open for anyone who wants to come in and design a $100 bill. Inside the gallery will be information about the project as well as a safe in the middle of the gallery floor with thousands of fundred drawings collected from local schools and community members across the state of Arkansas. The university will be one of four schools participating in Arkansas.

At 3:30 p.m., a small group of musicians from the music department will play New Orleans style music. Art professor Angela La Porte will give an introduction about the project and offer some background. Dean William Schwab of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences will speak, followed by artist Mel Chin.

Students will then begin taking the fundreds out of the safe in the gallery to be loaded onto a stretcher, accompanied by a chant composed by Ethel Simpson and chanted by members of the St. Joseph's Gregorian Schola. Once the money is loaded, a procession of students and community members present will be led by student musicians from the gallery to Old Main, where the Fundred Drawings will be loaded into the armored truck. There will be a small reception afterwards in front of the Fine Arts Gallery with more jazz music.

Mel Chin brought his blend of environmental commitment and transformational art and alchemy to the University of Arkansas in the spring, when from Jan. 12 through Feb. 9, 2009, he taught an intensive one-month course in the art department under the sponsorship of the McIlroy Family Visiting Professorship in the Performing and Visual Arts.

Chin believes that creativity and environmental awareness can transform politics, people and the places where they live. He conceived the Fundred Dollar Bill project as a way for millions of students and professional artists across the country to create their own works of art: hundred dollar bills. His aim: to collect 7,000 pounds of these bills and then ask that they be used to support an environmentally friendly rebuilding of New Orleans.

When he first visited New Orleans after the flooding, Chin said he felt “flooded” by the tragedy before him. But he eventually became detached enough, and angry enough, to return again, determined to help.

“The disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” he said.

He injects his art into unlikely places: entire neighborhoods, school classes, science and parades.

In a 2004 project with students at East Tennessee State University, he did not build a Weapon of Mass Destruction: he built a Warehouse of Mass Distribution. The WMD, a 71-foot-long, single-wide mobile home in the shape of a Peacekeeper MX nuclear missile, was finished with vinyl siding, aluminum windows and decorative light fixtures on the outside. After appearing in a parade, it was “decommissioned.”

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.

He was the second artist to visit campus as a McIlroy Family Visiting Professor in Performing and Visual Arts. The professorship was established by Hayden McIlroy Jr. and Mary Joe McIlroy of Dallas to enrich the arts for the university and the community.