Toward Common Cause with Mel Chin, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Emmanuel Pratt
06/02/20
By Abigail Winograd
Join the Smart Museum of Art on June 3 at noon (CDT) via Lumpen Radio's Twitch stream for a conversation with three MacArthur Fellows who are collaborating on projects that confront environmental pollution and their disproportionate impact on disinvested communities.
Artists Mel Chin and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle will discuss planned installations at Sweet Water Foundation with Sweet Water Executive Director Emmanuel Pratt. Chin’s newly announced Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL and Manglano-Ovalle’s Well are site-specific interventions planned as part of the multi-site, summer 2021 exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Program at 40. They will be joined by Smart Museum curator Abigail Winograd.
Mel Chin, Safehouse, a Fundred gathering, 2008-2010. Image courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art.
Mel Chin’s Fundred Project is a collaborative, creative action that focuses on lead contamination in water, soil, and housing—an invisible, environmental health threat to children. The project invites individuals to create their own “Fundred,” a facsimile of a hundred dollar bill. This form of creative currency affirms the right of each maker to equal protection against environmental hazard and demonstrates the value of the lives of children. Submissions to the Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL will be displayed at multiple locations throughout the city as beginning in summer 2021 part of Toward Common Cause.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Well. Image courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Well, the latest work in a series of the same name, will be installed at Sweet Water Foundation as a site for gathering, conversation, and reflection on water. Well directly engages questions of environmental racism, climate change, and the increasing scarcity of natural resources. This project, supported in part through a Fellowship at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and presented as part of Toward Common Cause, confronts the unequal distributions of resources and city infrastructure and the attendant burdens placed on already stressed neighborhoods in Chicago.
Founded by Emmanuel Pratt in 2014, Sweet Water Foundation is a nonprofit organization based on Chicago’s South Side that engages local residents in the cultivation and regeneration of social, environmental, and economic resources in their neighborhoods. Sweet Water Foundation’s flagship site, known as The Commons, offers dynamic arts and cultural spaces for local residents and artists. The Commons will be home to both Well as well as Chin’s Safehouse, a functioning bank-vault door that will be installed on an abandoned church building that is being transformed into a new civic arts space.
Abigail Winograd is MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the Smart Museum of Art.