ONLINE: Drawing Awareness to Childhood Lead Poisoning in Wisconsin

press release: Tune into a live, virtual panel with artist Mel Chin, along with environmental scientists, activists, and physicians, on the danger of lead poisoning in children in Wisconsin. Chin has spent decades bringing attention to the issue, with his Fundred Project, a nationwide art activation aimed at prompting political action to help resolve the problem. Lead poisoning affects countless communities—particularly in low-income areas—causing long-lasting effects on learning, development, and behavior.

Panelists include:

• Mel Chin, a North Carolina-based conceptual visual artist who initiated his nationwide art activation, the Fundred Project (on view at MMoCA now), aimed at prompting political action and increased government funding to help resolve the the problem of lead poisoning in children.         
• Marjorie Coons: program director for the Wisconsin Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program in the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health, Wisconsin Division of Public Health.
• Shy McElroy: a community organizer for the Coalition on Lead Emergency (COLE) in Milwaukee and the parent of a lead-affected child.
• Moderator Caroline Griffith, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Public Humanities Fellow at Midwest Environmental Advocates.
• Dr. Beth Neary, co-president of Wisconsin Environmental Health Network and a clinical adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is the Wisconsin representative for the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU), Region 5.

This free event is available on Facebook Live @MMoCAMadison. You don’t need a Facebook account to join this event.

The Art Into Action panel is co-sponsored by Midwest Environmental Advocates and the Wisconsin Environmental Health Network. Additional funding is provided by the Wisconsin Humanities Council.  

Mel Chin creates unique idiosyncratic objects to works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork. His 2014 ReMatch retrospective curator, Miranda Lash, described his practice as a mutative strategy, depending on concepts to derive the materials of its realization, from actions, to films, to objects, as necessary.

He pioneered the field of “green remediation,” with Revival Field (1991) and initiated the GALA Committee to conduct a public art project on prime-time television with In the Name of the Place (1995-98). His actions to end childhood lead-poisoning through mass public engagement activated a half a million individuals through the Fundred Project (2008-2021). He filled New York’s Times Square with, Wake, on the ground, and the Augmented Reality project, Unmoored, (2018) in the air, creating an experiential portal into a past maritime industry and a future of rising waters. His All Over the Place, a 40-year survey was named by Hyperallergic as the best NYC exhibition of 2018. Mel, a recipient of many awards recieved a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.