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For Immediate Release: Friday, July 16, 2021
Mel Chin: Safehouse Temple Door
The Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL.
June 28—ongoing
(CHICAGO)—2019 MacArthur Fellow Mel Chin and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art are proud to present Safehouse Temple Door, a newly commissioned public artwork at Sweet Water Foundation’s (SWF) Civic Arts Church—a community design center and gallery space for workshops, field lessons, and events at The Commonwealth. The Safehouse Temple Door is a functioning 10-ft steel bank-vault door installed on the facade of the historic building, a site that will serve as one of several activation points for the Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL, a creative collaborative action focused on lead contamination in water, soil, and housing.
Safehouse Temple Door was fabricated and engineered at the University of North Carolina Asheville STEAM Studio and designed as a permanent installation to be actively integrated into the philosophy and programming at Sweet Water Foundation.
Tours available Wednesdays, 1–4 pm
Reservations are required to receive a tour of the Toward Common Cause installations and Sweet Water Foundation’s dynamic Regenerative Neighborhood Development campus, known as The Commonwealth. Make a reservation to visit.
Mel Chin: Safehouse Temple Door is an initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40. The multi-site exhibition explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance.
Presented on the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by 29 visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. The project is curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.
In addition to Chin, selected artists include Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Toba Khedoori, Rick Lowe, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Julie Mehretu, Fazal Sheikh, and Xu Bing. Browse the full list of participating artists, projects, related events, and partner venues at the exhibition website towardcommoncause.org. The project is curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.
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Toward Common Cause
July 15–December 19, 2021
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Book a tour to see Safehouse Temple Door and the Sweet Water Foundation‘s dynamic Regenerative Neighborhood Development campus, known as The Commonwealth.
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Featured image by Ben Premeaux courtesy of S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio.