Mel Chin’s art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. 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. Chin also insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility.
He developed Revival Field (1989-ongoing), a project that has been a pioneer in the field of “green remediation,” the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. From 1995-1998 he formed the collective, the GALA Committee, that produced In the Name of the Place, a conceptual public art project conducted on American prime-time television. In KNOWMAD, Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic people facing cultural disappearance.
Chin also promotes “works of art” that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science, as in Revival Field, and also in the recent Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project, an attempt to make New Orleans a lead-safe city (see www.fundred.org.) These projects are consistent with a conceptual philosophy, which emphasizes the practice of art to include sculpting and bridging the natural and social ecology.
Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn is the Assemblymember and State Committee Woman / District Leader for New York State’s 42nd Assembly District representing Flatbush, East Flatbush, Midwood and Ditmas Park in Brooklyn.
The Blue Angels Drumline & Blue Royalty Dance team offers Drumming & Dance to all youth in New York City that are dedicated to learn. Their goal is to have a positive impact on all students; past, present and future in order to empower young people across the city and around the world.
Amanda Wiles is an artist and the director of S.O.U.R.C.E Studio. Prior to this role she was the director of Fundred Project and a special projects manager at Mel Chin Studio. Balancing creativity and pragmatism, Wiles works with artists and organizations supporting creative collaborations that bring people together in purpose and vision. With Mel Chin Studio, Wiles has led project teams and productions across the country and has been involved in many aspects of exhibition and project production. With Fundred Project, her involvement began supporting initial actions on the ground in New Orleans, coordinating educators across the country from 2008–2010, leading multiple city-based iterations and DC programs.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.
Fabiola R. Delgado may wear a badge as a Experience Developer at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum but she wears many hats as an independent curator, creative consultant, writer, and performer. Originally from Venezuela with a background in International Human Rights Law, she set headquarters in Washington DC, where she turned her career and now strives for justice through art and cultural experiences. Recognizing storytelling as the essence of her practice, Fabiola works on thought-provoking and imaginative projects that push the boundaries of perspectives and encourage intergenerational creative learning.
Jonah Mixon-Webster is a poet, educator, scholar, and art activist from Flint, MI. He is the founder of the Flint-based non-profit Center for Imaginative Freedoms and Economic Relief (C.I.F.E.R.) and serves as chapter leader of PEN America-Detroit. His debut poetry collection, Stereo(TYPE), received the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is an alumnus of Eastern Michigan University and obtained a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Illinois State University. He is the inaugural Mellon Arts Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Images & Voices of Hope, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including Obsidian, Harper’s, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Callaloo, Pennsound, Best New Poets, and Best American Experimental Writing.
Tabitha Williams is an activist, community organizer, and founding member for the grassroots coalition Parents for Healthy Homes, where she lends 24 years of expertise in environmental health advocacy work. Part of the Fundred network, Tabitha and other members of the Parents for Healthy Homes took part in the Fundred Artists of America program in Washington DC in 2019 for policy maker engagement. In 2018, she was recognized with the Woman of Hope Award from WMEAC’s Women and the Environment Symposium. In 2021, she joined the S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio board and is now serving as board chair.
Melissa Mays is an activist and organizer from Flint, Michigan. Fighting through the ongoing Flint Water Crisis firsthand, Melissa learned how important it is to protect families from water and environmental contamination. Through activism, pushing for new legislation, educating the public, scientific testing, community organizing, and winning precedent setting lawsuits and court battles for Environmental Justice and First Amendment rights, Melissa has worked to keep the Flint Water Crisis and solutions in the forefront. She has spent the past 7 years pushing for clean and affordable water regulations and infrastructure funding for all. Melissa founded Water You Fighting For, is an organizer/operations manager for Flint Rising, is a Social Worker/Community Health Worker in Flint and is part of many local and international social justice collaborations. Melissa works to show the human faces fighting the real-life consequences of the profit over people mindset while fighting the legacy that lead contamination leaves behind.
Hawley Hussey is an artist, writer and art education activist who first connected with the Fundred Project in the early days. Hawley activated her Flatbush PEACEBUILDERS from PS 119 in Brooklyn and they took to the streets to teach the public about the importance of art and activism and, in particular, the crisis that Mel Chin was creatively illuminating for us all. Hawley’s students became the first Funded Operatives, bringing Fundred making to neighborhoods and presented at a district wide Professional Development day at the Brooklyn Museum where they were the only student presence in the space. Hawley is quite sure these young students are engaged in art and activism to this day.
Tech Nix is an art student at the University of Chicago, Laboratory Schools. Tech worked with Mel Chin on the Fundred project in the summer of 2021.
Students from P.S. 29 in Castleton Corners on Staten Island – Students from P.S.29 created their own on Fundreds this Spring, and focused on art and activism in and outside the classroom. Led by P.S. 29 art teacher Zach Lombardi.
WE ACT’s mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and/or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices. WE ACT envisions a community that has: informed and engaged residents who participate fully in decision-making on key issues that impact their health and community; strong and equal environmental protections; and increased environmental health through community-based participatory research and evidence-based campaigns.
MichaelAngelo Rodriguez (b.1991 Meadowbrook, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working with photography and poetry. A 2018 BFA Fine Art Photography graduate from The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University. His photography employs strategies of time and light to express retrospection and displacement prompted by the catalyst of familial geographic separation. Writing for him is a tangible extension to his thoughts. In 2021, he presented a reading of his poetry as part of his first solo show Otro Tiempo at Transformer Gallery in Washington, DC. He is currently based in Washington, DC.
Tory Tepp situates his art practice at the intersection of land art, agriculture, eco-literacy and community engagement. After earning his MFA in Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design In Los Angeles, Tory’s practice became peripatetic, beginning with his role of the armored car driver for Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project. Subsequently, he worked on projects across the country in urban areas such as New Orleans, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Tampa, and Denver, as well as, rural and wilderness areas such as High Sierra Wilderness, Death Valley, the high plains of Colorado, and now, rural Wisconsin.
The Blue Angels Drumline & Blue Royalty Dance team offers Drumming & Dance to all youth in New York City that are dedicated to learn. Their goal is to have a positive impact on all students; past, present and future in order to empower young people across the city and around the world.