-: I'm delighted to welcome you all here tonight.
I'm Laura Reznicek.
I work at Sheldon.
And here we are at our March Collection Talk event tonight
to discuss Mel Chin's work.
Before we get started,
I wanted to extend several notes of appreciation.
First, to those of you here tonight who are Sheldon members.
Sheldon members make this event possible
and they keep the museum running every day,
and thank you to them.
And if you're interested in membership,
please go to our website and find out more.
Members are very important to us.
Tonight's conversation comes as a result
of a recent acquisition
made by the Sheldon Student Advisory Board
of a work of art by Mel Chin
that is currently on view
in the exhibition "The Scene Changes."
I wanna thank the exhibition sponsors,
Roseann and Phil Perry, Rhonda Seacrest,
and Donna Woods and Jon Hinrichs.
And I want to encourage you all
to come view the work in person,
if that's possible for you.
I also wanna invite you
to the final Collection Talk event of the spring.
On April 28th, artist Amanda Ross-Ho
will be in conversation about "Gone Tomorrow",
which is a sculpture
in which she recreated a single gold earring
at a monumental scale.
As for tonight,
we'd love for you to engage with the guests
that we have here.
So even though you're going to be muted,
please use the chat box
to type any questions or comments as we go.
Those will all be monitored,
and we will toss those out to our speakers towards the end.
And there will also be a time for questions at the end.
So I think that's all the housekeeping.
And with that out of way,
I'm going to turn it over to Erin Hanas,
Sheldon's Curator of Academic Engagement,
and she will introduce our speakers tonight.
-: Great. Thank you, Laura.
And thank you all.
Echoing Laura's thanks,
thank you all for joining us.
Before I introduce our first speaker,
I'd like to say a bit
about the Sheldon Student Advisory Board, or the SSAB.
This cross-disciplinary group,
which is open to all University of Nebraska students,
meets weekly to learn about museum operations,
collection strategies and exhibition management.
Each year, one of the groups' primary activities
is to research and recommend a work of art for acquisition.
The student selection process
rigorously mirrors that of the curatorial staff,
giving the students opportunities for experiential learning,
and the acquisition project is now in its fifth year.
For the 2021/22 year,
the SSAB selected the two works
from Mel Chin's "Revival Field" project,
that are the subject of this evening's program.
And give me a moment,
I'll share my screen so you can see these works.
There you are.
And just briefly,
I wanted to give a quick overview
of how tonight's program will run.
So, Mel Chin will begin with an artist talk.
Then, Molly Beck, a member of the SSAB,
will speak about why the students selected Mr. Chin's works
for the museum's collection.
Next, three faculty members will share insights
and responses to Mr. Chin's work
from the perspectives of their disciplines.
Professor Katie Anania from art history,
Professor Xu Li from civil and environmental engineering,
and Professor Sabrina Russo from biological sciences.
And as Laura already mentioned,
the program will conclude with time for audience questions,
so we welcome you to type your questions or comments
into the chat box.
Now I will stop my sharing here.
And it is my pleasure to introduce our first speaker,
Mel Chin.
Mel Chin is a conceptual artist
whose work is analytical and poetic,
and evades easy classification.
His art often requires multidisciplinary,
collaborative teamwork,
and conjoins cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas.
Insinuating art into unlikely places
such as destroyed homes, toxic landfills,
and popular television,
he investigates how art can provoke greater social awareness
and responsibility.
A conceptual philosophy
that emphasizes the practice of art
to include sculpting and bridging
the natural and social ecology,
underpins many of his projects.
Mr. Chin's work was documented
in the popular PBS program, "Art of the 21st Century."
Twice a National Endowment for the Arts fellow,
he has received many awards and grants,
including fellowships
from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2015,
and the MacArthur Foundation in 2019.
So with that, welcome Mr. Chin.
-: Hey, how you doing?
Okay.
So yeah,
I'm so pleased to be with you today,
and glad that we may...
Unfortunately, I might have an unstable connection,
but I'm with you, very stable.
I won't use the word genius,
I will just maintain stability.
So, I think I'll share my screen
and just talk about the pieces, the project,
so we can have a little history, background to it.
And let's see if I can get there, okay?
So "Revival Field",
it came at a time when I stopped making art for a while,
because I didn't...
I was maybe busted, disgusted, couldn't be trusted.
I had my first big museum show at the Hirshhorn,
and then afterwards I had these ruminations
about hearing voices in my head.
And one of them said, "What do you love doing?"
It says, "Well, you love working with your hands.
You like making objects
and like to make these research projects."
And there's another voice said, "Stop."
And I said, "I hear you. I will."
By the time I got down that elevator,
I really was convinced I would go back to New York,
I was living in New York at the time,
and not make art for a while.
Now this is unusual,
'cause it's after a major exhibition.
And I would start looking at everything but art.
And I started looking at science books, literature,
and even like hippie books or hippie magazines,
like the "Whole Earth Review."
And then I came upon an article
by this psilocybin expert and ethnobotanist,
Terence McKenna, in the "Whole Earth Review".
It talked about plants having this capacity to clean soil.
Now I became engaged in this concept
and thought the poetics of it was absolutely appropriate,
that if that were the case,
then perhaps what we're looking at,
sculpture becoming like an ecology
that has been damaged and reviving it through plants,
as the chisels and science as the basic backbone
of the project to guide those plants.
Of course, when I did the real deep research,
I found that there was no evidence of the plants
that he mentioned that would do that.
I did reach, finally, after maybe six months,
Dr. Rufus Chaney.
And Dr. Chaney,
when I mentioned the datura plant
that was indicated as a possible cleanup tool,
he said, "Well, that will get you high,
but it won't clean the soil,"
so I knew (laughs) I'd found the right person.
Of course, Dr. Chaney began to speak of things
in terms of art like, "Oh, I can make a plant go red.
I can make a plant go this way."
He was trying to make art,
and I was not interested in this.
I was interested in what he had postulated
but had shelved,
this idea of hyperaccumulation in plants.
But I realized that my ability to discuss it with him
in any professional level was limited,
so he recommended books to read.
He recommended Robert Richard Brook's book
on "Biochemical Methods of Prospecting",
or something like that.
It's Wiley and Sons.
The science and the team here can double check that.
But I began to understand
what the possibilities really were.
And so we started with this field test.
I realized that, Dr. Chaney said,
"Well, you know,
I can't really collaborate."
We call it a collaboration,
but it was actually not allowed,
because he was not allowed to do work in this field.
And I said, "We'll have to work our way around it.
I've got this grant that I might get from the NEA
for like $10,000."
He said, "Well, the experiment may be $100,000,
but it needs to be a replicated field test,
because it has never been planted in the world."
I said, then let's draw it up.
And let me match the poetics of the art dimension
with the pragmatism and what you need.
So this was the early study that I put forward.
You know, what happened was the project...
Let me see if I can advance this.
What happened was,
after I entered this collaboration science project
with the NEA,
it moves all the way up the ladder.
It got the votes.
And then at the last minute,
I was told that the chair
of the National Endowment for the Arts
had vetoed my project,
which, you can't even go back and change that.
And I'd worked a year without making art,
being like this guy who would go to parties now
no longer to talk about what I was making.
But I don't know if you've ever seen the film
"The Graduate",
but there's a guy that's walking around,
I'm not the chief character or Mrs. Robinson,
I was actually the guy walking around
that was, instead of saying "plastics",
I was saying "plants".
And people felt I was seriously in need
of other kinds of help,
because I should be making art.
I said, "'Cause I see the art in this."
And so when this article came out about the rejection,
it activated...
to Dr. Chaney,
it was in the most premier scientific journal, I guess,
"Science".
And it verified some of his thoughts.
The only problem with this article by the way,
is some of the numbers are wrong.
The plants actually, they're not...
You look through it,
it says 2,500 parts per million of zinc.
As he said, it actually should be 25,000
parts per million of zinc.
It would be what you call a hyperaccumulator.
So this actually got me involved
with the entire scientific community.
They say, "Wait a minute, we're doing this."
But I worked away, okay?
What can I say?
I worked away. We planted the field.
I can't say all the ways I worked to do this,
but we started it and it was a success,
in terms of even accomplishing it.
Now, it's small. It's not a gigantic situation.
And a lot of people point to the formality of it.
And in truth, as an artist I like to do that,
but it was actually more than that.
So it's not always this formality of this circle,
the square, the target.
It's not always the soil sampling that we had to do
for three years.
And it's not just this amazing plant,
Thlaspi caerulescens is the variety we used,
that came from a site in Belgium
that had these plants, or alpine pennythrift,
had naturally occurred over time,
over millennia,
and were able to pick up,
hyperaccumulate zinc and cadmium.
And this was the final harvest,
which the PR department says,
"Absolutely do not show the skyline of St. Paul,"
which we absolutely did immediately.
This is the most important part.
This line that says Thlaspi.
This was a verification that it needed for the art project
actually to propel the scientific technology
as a possibility of reality.
And this was probably the most important contribution
of "Revival Field",
to say, "Yes, it can happen."
So anyway, it's been many years.
I always say "Revival Field" is not done,
because until we actually clean a whole field up,
we don't have that.
But many other scientists are working on this.
And like Dr. Bates said,
the other first test site in the world is in England,
and working on things.
So I have these things,
and I think about the whole history.
And this is from the Field Museum by the way,
I didn't make this.
But I love dioramas, okay.
So, I dig them. Don't y'all?
I think so.
I mean, maybe I'm the only one.
So I decided to do my own diorama,
which was the "Revival Field" diorama
with the actual plants and things from the field,
you see, that I collected for those years ago,
many years ago.
So this is in 2014.
So I began to collect this.
And this is why I had this new drive
to create this piece that you have.
So, it became like something that I said,
"Well, that diorama's not enough."
I wanted these sketches to test the methodology
and to seal the actual plants.
I had to hydrate them, press them,
and talk about amounts of the hyper...
And these are diagrams
that represent amounts of hyperaccumulation,
and the other one
is just about this relationship between them.
So, these two are just kind of evidence from my own studio,
of my obsession with this project.
So I'm so pleased y'all have them.
And we can go into all the deep questions
that come from here. Okay?
I'm sorry that was so long, but we can go forward.
All right.
-: No, that was really wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Hopefully for our audience,
I know for me personally,
it's really amazing to see the context,
how the "Revival Field" project really developed
and then the works that came out of that,
and just your thinking.
So before I blabber on too much,
I want to introduce our next speaker.
Molly Beck is a senior English major
with minors in art history and history.
She has been a member of the SSAB for three years.
And I will turn it over to you, Molly.
-: Thanks Erin.
So every year,
SSAB gets together to choose an artwork
to acquire for Sheldon's collection.
And this year's acquisition project
revolved around the theme of climate resilience.
So once we knew the theme,
we talked about how expansive this idea could be,
and we started researching artists
and looking for relevant works of art
that were available for purchase.
It was in this process of researching
that I encountered Mel Chin and his work for the first time.
Specifically, I saw an image
of "Revival Field Plant and Field Study,"
and I was instantly taken by it.
When I showed it to the rest of the SSAB members,
we agreed that it was an extremely compelling work
and would be a perfect fit for Sheldon,
seamlessly integrating itself
into the museum's collection and exhibitions,
such as the one that it is currently a part of,
titled, "The Scene Changes."
When thinking about the theme of climate resilience,
all of us agreed that we wanted a work
that pointed to ways we could move forward,
and what might be done
about human's impact on the environment.
We didn't want a work
that simply illustrated negative or apocalyptic effects
of this impact on the world,
and that aspect of resilience really drove our research.
What drew us to these works by Mel Chin
was in part their connection
to his larger "Revival Field" project.
As Nebraska is a land-grant research university,
we thought it was important that these artworks
provide a unique opportunity for students across campus
to see how art and science could come together
to create compelling projects and conversations.
We liked that Mel Chin's work
utilized and incorporated materials from the earth.
They're composed of soil and plant matter,
rather than paint and canvas.
Another aspect of the works that drew us to them
is that the "Revival Field" site is in the Midwest,
at Pig's Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota,
so this geographic proximity
made the work feel even more relevant to us.
Finally, the works are evocative.
They do not give away any answers right away to the viewer.
You must keep coming back,
looking more closely,
and viewing the artworks from different perspectives.
In this way,
Mel Chin's works allow for discussion,
inquiry and discovery,
making them invaluable
to the academic community on campus now
and in the future.
Both of these artworks highlight Mel Chin's focus
on multidisciplinary concepts that connect aesthetics
with social and environmental awareness.
They immortalize the creative and scientific research
that was done at "Revival Field."
By encasing in glass,
organic and inorganic materials
collected directly from the project site,
Mel Chin brings "Revival Field's" environmental
and artistic concerns into the context, the gallery,
and he demonstrates that cross-disciplinary collaborations
can lead to significant findings and possible solutions.
Moreover,
he shows that art is an important form of research.
So we at the Student Sheldon Advisory Board
are so excited to have acquired the two works by Mel Chin,
and we are grateful to him
for participating in today's event.
We look forward to the conversations
that will arise from the work from all corners of campus,
starting with the diverse perspectives
of the faculty presenters coming up next.
Thank you.
-: Molly, thank you so much.
I am going to now turn it over to Katie Anania,
who is an Assistant Professor of Art History
in the School of Art, Art History and Design,
and a Faculty Fellow
of The Daugherty Water for Food Institute.
She's currently a Tyson Scholar of American Art
at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Katie.
-: Thank you everyone. Can you hear me okay?
Is the audio, does this work?
Okay, great.
Thank you so much to the Sheldon's engagement team
and to Mel Chin,
and to the Student Advisory Board for inviting me.
I'm so pleased to be here
and to share my thoughts on this extraordinary work.
I'm gonna share my screen now.
Okay.
Let me know if that is looking problematic for anyone.
These two works by Mel Chin,
that the Student Advisory Board
has recommended for the collection,
really got me thinking about
visual cultures of waste containment,
like how we visualize the containment of waste.
And also about how pictures of contaminated sites,
no matter where those sites are,
or what has contaminated them,
they always seem to argue
for the need to separate human beings
from the contaminated matter.
It feels part of this longer Cold War tradition
of containment.
This idea that contaminated matter is contaminated forever,
and those who are are already contaminated are other,
and they must be separate.
But for today I was asked,
how might looking at and engaging with this kind of artwork
impact students and scholars in art and art history,
especially in thinking about traditions
of environmental and ecological art.
So it's kind of working against the grain
of this ethos of separation,
that I wanna assemble all these components
of this work together.
These two works are a small piece, you know,
a test sample themselves really,
of this larger project on a Superfund site
that includes the plants, the fence,
and all the planning documents that went into the work.
With these two works,
we find ourselves facing the soil
and the plants as main characters,
preserved specimens
that have cycled through their role in the project,
and then whose contributions
are captured and imaged after the fact.
You know,
there are some notes on the sides of the works
that tell us about the contamination.
Among the plants not pictured, by the way,
is Zea mays or American sweet corn,
a very common agricultural product in the Midwest,
which in addition to its capacity
as a hyperaccumulator for pollution,
is also an incredibly prolific grower
and had numerous deities and names for it
in pre-Columbian societies.
The plant that is in the Sheldon's acquisition
is the Thlaspi caerulescens plant.
This member of the Brassica family
has done a sculpting action on the earth,
as Mel Chin calls it.
But this sculpting action happens sub-visibly,
almost magically.
I'm sorry. I lost my place guys, sorry.
Sub-visibly, almost magically inside the soil,
pressed into a thin layer
between the pieces of glass inside the frame.
Contained, as long as visitors and researchers
behave themselves and don't break the glass.
This plant that performs this wondrous action
and the soil that's altered it,
all these things are pressed inside this glass matrix,
set inside a diagram that both abstracts the soil site
and also replicates it in miniature.
Of course, this makes me think of the French artist,
Marcel Duchamp's work,
"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."
This work was a monument to Duchamp's interest
in scientific practices in the early 20th century.
In creating this large painting on glass,
Duchamp tried to leave behind
the wild emotional world of avant garde art,
and become instead a scientist
with rigorous standards in practices for his art.
And that's why this work also looks like a specimen,
also kind of like a film still.
So what becomes clear here,
is that both science and art have a rich array
of established practices for capturing the interactions
between living organisms and their habitat.
In fact, prior to industrialization,
artworks were a much more direct register
of these kinds of interactions.
Pigments were sourced from plants and precious minerals.
Canvases and other backdrops were made of natural materials.
And I think this is one of the primary forms of inspiration
that we can take from Chin's work as well.
For Mel Chin, dead matter doesn't really exist.
The dead or spent remains of one thing
are always ready to be transfigured and to find new form.
This work from 1975, "Vertical Palette",
maps this concept in terms of art making,
chemistry and metaphysics.
For this work,
Chin placed five jars in a handmade wooden rack.
Inside each jar is a material
that corresponds to the Chinese theory
of the five elements.
Water at the top, wood,
then fire or smoke,
earth and metal, or ground-up lead.
In traditional Chinese painting,
even the painter's tool
should correspond to these materials.
So charred, burnt or exhumed matter always finds new life
when the artist mixes it into pigment.
In fact, we could say more broadly
that art has been central to these revolutionary ideas
for how to reuse and recirculate matter for centuries.
Take the Argentine artist Marta Minujín for instance,
who obtained authorization
from the government of Peru in 1976,
to extract 65 pounds of soil
from the Ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu.
She took it home with her to Buenos Aires.
She built a giant nest out of part of the dirt,
which you see on the right.
And she sent small portions of the rest of the dirt
to her friends in the mail.
The friends then sent her packages of their own local soils,
which she returned to Machu Picchu in a private ceremony
that was also informed by a scientific collaboration
in her region.
-: Katie?
-: Yes.
-: Are you able to share your slides on your computer please?
I'm not sure if that's showing for everybody.
-: Oh, let's see.
I'm gonna stop the share
because I've been sharing and flipping through.
Apologies everyone.
Moderator: No problem.
All right, let's try to get this started again.
So it says I'm sharing my screen.
Can everyone see?
Yep, we can see the little pod now.
-: Oh, okay great. All right.
Well, it should be even better with visual aids.
Look at this.
(audience member laughs)
Here we go.
Or, thinking of Ana Mendieta,
who in her photographic series, "Siluetas",
buried her own body
under piles of earth and plant matter.
This image from the Sheldon's collection,
called "Tumba" or "Tomb",
shows the ephemeral and vulnerable nature of the human body
as measured against natural material,
while the tiny plant on top of the mound
gestures toward a regenerative future.
Still others,
like Agnes Denes' one acre project, "Wheatfield,"
which she constructed
in New York City's Battery Park in 1982,
used plant cultivation to challenge the way
that we organize human habitats like cities,
which are generally a long truck ride
away from most farms.
In installing "Wheatfield" on top of a landfill
just outside Battery Park,
Agnes Denes drew those worlds closer together.
The 20th century has seen an explosion
of research-based projects like "Revival Field",
that use STEAM research methods.
These projects,
like the Future Farmers' social practice work,
"Soil Kitchen",
explored the class and racialized dimensions
of polluted brownfields.
The collective installed a cafe next to a brownfield
in a Central Pennsylvania neighborhood.
Residents could bring soil samples from their home,
to be tested in exchange for free soup.
Works like this,
which measured humanity's proximity to toxins,
or like "Revival Field",
which treat plant life as a mechanism for toxic remediation,
really help us get a clearer view of how we might understand
human natural relationships differently.
What defines life or liveness?
How might we take the current conditions
in which we find ourselves?
You know, in this moment where cleaning up messes
is this massive, enormous task in STEM fields,
and turn those conditions into something
fertile, creative and lively,
even when our most familiar sources
of money or other resources fail.
How are bodies vulnerable and how are they resilient?
Mel Chin's work sparks these questions and more,
and we look forward to helping build its legacy
in the Sheldon's collection.
Thank you.
-: Katie.
Wondered if you could flip through the slides
from the beginning,
since I don't think everyone
was able to see all of the slides.
-: Yeah. I think if we have time, I'd be happy to.
Let me pop this up and we'll make sure
that everyone can see it from the beginning.
I'll go all the way back.
I'm scrolling through it for you, re-sharing.
Okay.
All right.
So this is the Nevada test site.
And the Marcel Duchamp large glass.
And I'm not sure when we all caught up to each other.
Oh yes, the Marta Minujin,
"Comunicando con tierra,"
communicating with the earth.
There's Mel Chin's "Vertical Palette",
with the five Chinese elements inside.
And then that's the end.
Apologies everybody.
-: Thanks so much.
I am now going to turn this over to Xu Li,
who's a Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Programs
of Civil and Environmental Engineering
in the College of Engineering,
and a Faculty Fellow
of The Daugherty Water for Food Institute.
He is also a Professor of Animal Science by courtesy.
Welcome Professor Xu.
Professor Li, excuse me.
-: Thank you.
And can you see my slides okay? Great.
Good evening, everyone.
Thanks for the opportunity to speak at the event.
I want to use the next few minutes
to give you some technical background
about the pollutant and the technology,
and also share some of the thoughts
about how arts and engineering can be connected.
So cadmium was one of the pollutant in the soil,
and that belongs to one class of pollutant
called heavy metals.
And heavy metals are metallic elements
with a relatively high density.
And there are different kinds of heavy metals.
Some of the heavy metals
actually can be essential elements for plant growth,
like copper and iron.
But there are also other heavy metals
like cadmium and arsenic,
those are non-essential for plants,
and also at high concentrations can be toxic to plants.
All those heavy metals
are naturally occurring in the environment.
And the map shown here is from USGS,
it shows the arsenic levels in water samples
collected across the states,
and some of the red spots highlight some of the areas
where there's naturally higher arsenic concentrations.
And also, those heavy metals
can be introduced into the environment
through human activities,
for example,
disposal of waste water from the oil and gas industry,
and disposal of waste from the metal mining,
and even the use of phosphorus fertilizers.
Cadmium, like other heavy metals,
it also occurs naturally.
Cadmium actually make up to 0.1 part per million
of the Earth's crust.
And cadmium is produced mainly as the byproduct
from the mining and a refining process
of the ores of another metal, zinc.
And about 86% of all the cadmium produced
is used to manufacture nickel-cadmium batteries,
so like the picture shows here.
When we dispose those batteries in trash
they move to the landfills.
After the outer surface is disintegrated,
cadmium and nickel may be released into the environment.
And the contamination site illustrated in Mel Chin's work
is from the Pig's Eye Landfill in Minnesota,
and that is the Superfund site located near St. Paul.
And that particular place contains contaminants,
including heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury.
And at one point,
that is the largest unpermitted dump site
in the state of Minnesota.
Those heavy metals not only polluted the soil,
but it also has the potential to contaminate
the surface water bodies around the site.
The reason people care about heavy metals in soil
is because they could have
negative environmental and health impacts.
Those heavy metals,
they tend to persist in soil for a very long time.
At higher concentrations,
those heavy metals can have a severe impact
on the growth of crops.
Even at the lower concentrations,
even though plants can survive,
but those heavy metals may accumulate in the plants,
as shown in this figure.
This shows if the rice crop is planted in the soil,
polluted with heavy metals,
then those heavy metals may accumulate in the rice green,
and then the rice green will enter the food chains
and eventually accumulate in the body of human and animals.
So there are different technologies
that can mitigate heavy metals in soil.
A soil incineration has been a technique
that's used high temperatures to destroy pollutants in soil,
but the downside of this technology
is it cause irreversible changes to soil
and the soil coming out of incineration
may no longer be suitable for agricultural use.
And landfill and soil washing,
they merely move the polluted soil
from one location to another,
or move the pollutant from one face of soil to another face,
which is the wash water.
And both technologies can produce secondary pollutions.
And compared to those technologies we mentioned earlier,
phytoremediation is a cost-effective approach.
And essentially, it's the solar energy
that's powered the process,
and it can be widely applied to different soil types,
and it can be quite efficient.
It can even extract heavy metals
at relatively low concentrations from soil.
And also because it involves the use of plant,
it's considered an environmentally friendly technology.
So during phytoremediation,
the plants will absorb those pollutants in soil
through their roots.
For a lot of the plants,
they may not look big above soil,
but they can have large root systems
extend deep and wide underneath the soil surface.
When the root extends into the soil matrix,
it will establish something
called the rhizosphere ecosystems.
And the processes that happens in the rhizosphere soil
can really help the plant accumulate heavy metals.
Once heavy metals gets into the root,
they can be transported from the roots
to the shoots of the plant,
or across the cellular membrane of the plant.
On this last slide.
I kind of want to show
some of the connections between arts and engineering.
And arts and engineering are very different disciplines,
but there are places where they can be connected.
For folks who live in Lincoln,
whenever you pass 27th street,
you may notice there's those ball-shaped structures
near the side of the highway bridge, yes.
And those structures actually is used to collect the biogas
from the waste-water treatment process.
The biogas is actually a form of renewable energy
that can be used to generate electricity and generate heat.
So a few years ago,
all you can see would be these gray structures.
And a few years ago,
the treatment facilities decided to paint the structure
and has the word Lincoln renew,
and also paint those leaf-shape paint
onto the structure,
and really brings out the renewable nature
of the biogas that is being stored in the structure.
And also,
arts can be used to illustrate engineering processes,
like the one shown in Mel Chin's work.
And when I look at this art piece in the Sheldon museum,
if you look really closely we can see the close association
between the soil particles in the root of the plant,
that really kind of illustrates
why the root plants would be effective,
accumulating the pollutant from the soil particles
and hyperaccumulate inside the plant.
And also, artworks can help improve the awareness.
Last semester when the Sheldon museum
had the "Nature of Waste" exhibit,
I brought my engineering students to the museum,
and engineering students were really able to see
how artists can convert some of the waste into art piece,
and bring out the message
of environmental conservation and sustainability.
And with that, I will stop sharing.
Thank you.
-: Thank you, Professor Li.
We have one more faculty member for another perspective.
So delighted to welcome Sabrina Russo,
a Professor of Biological Sciences
in the School of Biological Sciences,
director of the Russo Lab,
and a member of the Center for Plant Science Innovation.
-: Good evening, everyone.
And thank you very much for this invitation.
It's really, truly a great honor and pleasure
to be able to share my perspectives as a plant biologist
on these remarkable works of art by Mel Chin
that were recently acquired by the Sheldon Museum of Art.
Are these advancing? Yes? Good. (laughs)
All right.
First of all,
I just wanted to mention a number of features struck me
when I first observed these art pieces.
But most of all,
I was struck by the choice
of the circular representation of the soil.
And to me, the choice of a circle
resembles the spherical shape of the planet earth.
And the circle can also be seen
to symbolize cycles and feedback
that are very important in the natural world.
And a point there is that there is a feedback
between what we as humans do to the earth,
and what it in turn does to us.
Another striking feature to me is that Mr. Chin
has chosen to place the plants
at the center of the earth and circle,
which I view also as meaningful,
in that plants are truly at the center
of nearly all life on earth.
And to illustrate that point,
we can explore how plants have shaped Earth's environment.
So over 3 billion years ago,
the evolution of oxygen-producing photosynthetic organisms
began to dramatically change the Earth's atmosphere,
and that's shown here in this kind of complicated timeline
that shows different models
for how the concentration of the Earth's oxygen
in the Earth's atmosphere changed,
with respect to time,
in billions of years ago,
where the zero on the X axis shows the present time.
And so photosynthesis, as you all may know,
is the biochemical process
whereby plants convert atmospheric carbon dioxide
into sugars that they use for energy,
but then also as building blocks
for constructing their tissues.
And this process of photosynthesis releases oxygen,
gaseous oxygen, into the atmosphere as a byproduct.
And so the evolution and growth
of these photosynthetic organisms
began what is known as the great oxidation event,
3 billion years ago.
And this massive increase
in the oxygen concentration in Earth's atmosphere
started, and was continued later,
about 480 million years ago,
when the land plants diversified.
And this ultimately set the stage
for the evolution of complex oxygen-breathing animals
such as ourselves.
So while photosynthetic organisms
have paved the way, ultimately,
for the evolution of homosapiens on earth,
humanity is now altering earth
in ways that both increase our dependence on plants,
and that make earth inhospitable to plants.
So for example, by cutting down forests
and other natural perennial vegetation,
and by altering soil systems,
we are reducing Earth's capacity
to absorb the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide
that human activities are releasing into the atmosphere.
And humanity is transforming earth in many ways.
The carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases that we produce,
as has been pointed out, are waste.
But we produce many other forms of waste,
such as the heavy metals that are in the soil
of the Pig's Eye hazardous waste landfill in Minnesota,
which is the site
of Mr. Chin's art installation "Revival Field",
from which materials for these beautiful art pieces
have been sourced.
And the soil of the "Revival Field"
has high concentrations of cadmium and zinc,
which are both toxic heavy metals.
And so in these art pieces,
we once again see the centrality of plants,
depicted both in Mr. Chin's vision,
and also reflected in nature.
So here at the center is Thlaspi caerulescens,
shown beautifully dried and pressed.
And this is a plant species
in the mustard or Brassicaceae family.
It is a heavy metal hyperaccumulator,
so that means it can grow,
survive and reproduce quite well
in soils that have elevated concentrations of heavy metals
that are intolerable to most plants.
And there's currently great interest
in these heavy metal hyperaccumulating species,
because of this growing problem
of soil contamination with heavy metals,
and the need for feasible
and economical remediation options.
So, many metals are required by plants and by people
as micronutrients,
but generally only in very small quantities.
And so above a certain threshold
these metals become toxic,
by interfering with the functioning of enzymes
that regulate life's metabolic processes.
What's interesting
is that heavy metal hyperaccumulating plant species
have evolved special molecular mechanisms,
that are shown here in this kind of complex conceptual model
from a recent paper on the topic.
And these mechanisms allow the plants
to take up these metals and sequester them in their tissues.
So often this involves chelation of the heavy metal,
which allows the plant to take it into the cell
and also to transport it from the soil into the roots,
and then up above ground into the stem and into the leaves.
And in addition,
this also involves very specialized protein transporters
that sit in the cell membranes
and act kind of like doorways,
shuttling these chelated metals into various places.
So appreciation of Thlaspi caerulescen
as a heavy metal hyperaccumulator
dates back to the mid 1800s,
when it was found growing on very zinc-rich soils in Europe.
And then also to have foliar concentrations of zinc
as high as 18% by dry weight,
which is actually quite high
when you consider that usually plant leaves
contain about 40% carbon,
which the main element that comprises them.
And to date, about 400 plant species,
belonging to a wide range of plant families,
have been reported as heavy metal hyperaccumulators.
But even though that number seems kind of large,
this capacity for hyperaccumulation is actually quite rare,
as these 400 species only comprise less than about 0.2%
of all flowering plant species.
So while the "Revival Field" is a very unnatural site,
heavy metal-tolerant and hyperaccumulating plant species
have evolved in soils
that are naturally high in heavy metals,
and some of these are known as serpentine soils.
So these serpentine soils
have very high concentrations of heavy metals
chromium, iron, cobalt, and nickel,
and as a result they're very shallow and infertile
and support only very sparse vegetation,
which you can see
when you compare the non-serpentine soil
here in this image in panel A,
the vegetation growing on it
compared to the vegetation growing in panel B,
which is on a serpentine soil.
And these types of unusual soils
have resulted in the evolution
of what are called edaphic endemics,
which are plant species
that are principally found only on particular soil types.
And the effect of serpentine soils on plant diversity
is actually quite large.
And in California,
where these images were taken
and where a lot of work has been done on serpentine soils,
the serpentine soils only comprise less than 1%
of the state's land area,
but the serpentine endemic plant species
make up about 10% of California's flora.
And these patterns are also observed at the global scale.
So more than half
of the world's plant biodiversity hotspots,
that are shown here in the blue shading,
are associated with these types of unusual soils,
such serpentine soils,
the locations of which are shown by these black dots.
So in these respects,
photosynthetic organisms, including plants,
are truly at the center of our existence,
as we owe our very origin
and continued life on earth to them.
And Mel Chin's art pieces
engender contemplation of the relationship of humanity
to the diversity of life on earth,
and also illustrate how many disciplines intersect
in the interpretation of these art pieces.
-: Thank you so much, Professor Russo.
Really fascinating
to hear all of the different perspectives.
And I'll say that this program is our attempt,
we wanted to try something new.
Our Student Advisory Board members
were really wanting to take a work of art
and use it as a way to facilitate dialogue
and inquiry across disciplines,
so using this program as a demonstration
of how that really truly is possible.
Want to give you, Mr. Chin, a moment
if you would like to respond to anything
that was just presented,
raised by Molly or professors Anania, Li and Russo,
before we open it up to audience questions.
-: Dig it.
All right. All right.
Dig it. Yeah.
Soil, plant, okay.
Yeah.
One thing that's important to talk about,
how I thought about this work as an active project.
We see art always being relegated to bringing awareness,
which it should do,
and certainly the pieces that you have do that.
But part of the larger project
was actually to create science, you know?
And so I had this kind of attitude
when people would ask me
was "Revival Field", the bigger project, art?
I knew there was adversity.
I would say, "No it's science."
And when they would say, "Is it science?"
I would say, "No it's art."
Because I shape-shifted
according to the needs of progressing the data
and understanding of this work.
I also really appreciate that the breakdowns
that all three scholars did
from historic to scientific kind of realities
that I did study at.
Because part of this was important.
To create the piece,
I was driven by this poet dimension that would push me,
even when I was rejected from the polluters
and told I could not work on the land.
And could not hear no,
'cause the power of the possibility of this was so profound.
And then the other aspect
was the pragmatism that was demanded.
If I'm going to be doing this in a site
that has potentiality for danger to a person,
then it's not just my protection,
but it's almost like,
how can we do something that is responsible?
And therefore, working with scientists,
I love working with scientists
'cause we could find a way where, with Dr. Chaney,
we had to harvest the plants very carefully
to send back to the laboratory
so they could be assayed,
to assay, I don't know the word.
English. Molly, help me.
So that it would be properly done. You know?
So this is where "Revival Field" might be slightly different
from just tackling formality of a shape or image,
it was the unseen parts are so important.
It's like, what did it accomplish?
I think finally, I love this focus on the dirt,
'cause that's the other side, or the soil,
because I kinda paraphrase a lot, James Baldwin's idea,
that the idea of art or the concept of art
is to unearth the questions
that are buried within the answers.
And I think that kind of vision
helped drive a project like this.
And I think that if you look at these pieces,
'cause it's not the whole project,
I hope that art can be a catalytic structure
to lead you into the research.
If not into art,
it can lead you into science and history
that was so eloquently presented.
So, there you go.
In other words, I dug what you said and y'all cool.
But y'all can come back at me any way you want, okay?
We're friends. (laughs)
-: We actually have a question from the chat
to get us started.
So Jenny Schlossmann asks,
did Mel Chin look at herbarium samples
to get an idea of how to exhibit the plants and the soil,
specifically the way it was pressed between the glass?
-: Absolutely.
Yeah. You have to open your eyes and be informed.
And in fact, I looked at not only herbarium samples,
I was looking for other types that may be hyperaccumulators
to help the scientists.
That was because some of the original Thlaspi specimens
were found in the 1870s, I think.
And so I did not only that,
I would make heavy metal points,
or zinc and cadmium,
'cause zinc and cadmium
are commonly found together in the waste field,
and make metal point drawings of the actual plant
using images of herbarium samples.
I didn't present those,
but that was something else I would do,
and sometimes put a nugget of the actual heavy metal
floating above it,
to again, provoke more questions.
So yes,
there was a lot of plant cray-cray attitude on my part,
not looking at art history books,
but looking at biological specimens, herbarium samples.
-: We have another question from Moneal.
What solutions may have been revealed
by "Revival Fields" in construction
that can address issues in a state like Nebraska,
which has a lot of soil mitigation issues as well.
-: You know, "Revival Field" was very specific.
It was testing Thlaspi
as a particular zinc and cadmium collector.
By the way, zinc is good for our bodies,
but I'd love the biologists,
and botanists and scientists can confirm
that it is terrible for plants.
Zinc can be highly destructive for life of plants.
So in other words, one can break another.
You know, I always say that when you create an idea
that has this poetic potential
to be careful as well,
to then rely on science.
To really understand the test, the soil
and understand what's going on in Nebraska.
I know that Dr. Cheney,
in our last conversation years ago
was really excited about a nickel accumulator
that was important.
So it depends on what it is.
It's not like,
I advise that nothing is really a cure-all,
but it's something that exists now because of this work.
And I'm not saying just the artwork,
I'm saying the scientific work.
And so again, when people first thought about this,
heard about this,
they thought I'm out collecting lead,
whereas too my knowledge,
no plants to this day collect lead.
So part of our job is to leave misconceptions,
because again, it deals with people's lives
and their health and their future.
So there was a while, there was a focus on sunflowers
of having that capacity, and true actually.
So I don't wanna be a downer tonight,
but I just wanna let y'all know,
I can send you the papers on that as well.
So I keep up with it.
This is not the only project I've done.
And so, but I could answer what I can.
And then of course,
I would always refer people to Dr. Chaney,
who's still in contact with me, you know,
and his whole network of agronomists
and scientists that know about this.
-: If anybody likes,
you can feel free to unmute yourself
if you have questions,
the audience or our professors.
Yeah, Katie.
-: I have a question,
because we've unpacked so beautifully
the the scientific implications of this work
and it's rigor and its effectiveness
when there were no other ways to do this testing.
And I keep coming back to the works themselves.
You know, there's so much rebuilt
between those little glass slides.
Like, it's so poetic.
And I think that when artists make really large projects
that have these adjuncts or component parts,
or parts that live on in museums and galleries,
there's such a cool
historical scientific experimental materiality to them.
Like, there's something very sexy and exciting
about the things themselves.
So I have two questions.
One is for Mel Chin,
which is do you have any specific way,
did you have any ambitions
for how to diagram or miniaturize
or reactivate this experiment?
And then I have another part of that question
going to my colleagues,
which is that when you teach in your fields,
do you ever ask your students
what they find cool-looking (laughs)
about their experimental apparatus?
Like, what they might show or how they might mobilize
some of like all of the complicated stuff
that happens in the lab.
-: I can take the first part, 'cause it's directed to me.
But as a conceptualist,
sometimes it's all about the idea.
And when you like to make things,
then it's a matter of really challenging yourself
to create the formal structures
that can carry the full impact.
Like, in order to do those pieces that you have,
I had to really look at what I truly love
about ways that information is conveyed.
And I looked at, again, the dioramas
from the Field Museum, or any museum,
and then say,
"well, I need to make one of this to tell this story".
And I've conveyed the science of "Revival Field",
or the process of "Revival Field",
in drawings and prints and many ways,
sometimes telling three possible scenarios of progress,
and then how to convey the arc of time.
So you can do it dimensionally.
I feel like I've gotta send you all a bunch more materials
to accompany your collection, right?
I'll just give you some things.
So, expect some things in the mail (laughs)
because it's important
that now you've started with these pieces,
I feel that the way I work is many different ways.
And I research actually art and science or ideas,
to destroy my preconceived notions
about what things should look like,
and return to them in a final form.
-: Maybe I can say a few words about the second question.
In the lab we do not directly work with plants,
but we do work with bacteria.
We use bacteria to mitigate a lot of the pollutant.
And a lot of pollutant we study
are actually colorless and odorless.
Sometimes it's very hard to envision.
But the microbes,
we can see them under the microscope.
And under the microscope we can see how microbes interact,
well, how they're located in a soil matrix,
and how different microbes
are kind of especially located next to each other
and interact with each other.
So for us,
it's seeing those microscopic images
that's really fascinating,
that really put how the microbes do the remediation work
right in front of our eyes.
-: Yes, there's absolutely a lot of beauty in microscopy.
(laughs)
-: I just wanna add something real briefly.
The "Revival Field" also,
I think there's like maybe five postdocs
that came out of "Revival Field".
Future, farther experiments,
one in Palmerton, Pennsylvania as well,
and in Germany.
And what they were looking at, just as note,
were looking at mycorrhizal kind of relationships
with hyperaccumulation.
So looking at funguses as well as that,
and how they interact,
as Dr. Li has indicated.
So, I'm glad to hear that it's still active
and people are still checking it out, scoping it out.
-: This is so interesting.
I think there's like...
It's always ideal to keep in mind
this strong tradition of scientific practices
looking very much like artistic practices,
and then the creation modes being kind of the same.
I mean, that's really evident
when you look at design labs at MIT
who are making new forms and shapes
for biogas storage containers, for instance.
But like the practice of drawing for instance,
or the practice of like replicating
and making publicly available
the image of microbes.
Like, all of those things
are just what constitute knowledge for us.
Like it feels kind of exciting
to draw those things together
in this forum, in this moment.
-: We have a message in the chat
from one of our SSAB members.
Sophie Curso asks,
since you said you had taken a step back from art
before starting this project, Mr. Chin,
when you began making these pieces,
did it feel like an extension of "Revival Field"
in your art making process?
Kind of, where did you land on that scientific art spectrum
when you were in your new creative process
with "Revival Field"?
-: Well, the creation of "Revival Field"
was happening when I negated making art.
It happened at that moment and it lasted about a year.
Then I just couldn't help myself,
I had to make things again
because then I liberated myself by working in that field.
So these pieces were made much later,
when I was reviewing that whole history
and trying to find gaps within it,
or things I could have made and never made.
I had that soil safely contained and also the plants.
I said, "Well, I can't just leave them
in those bags and those jars," you know?
They cried to be free,
and maybe they could express a little more, you know?
So I listened to things,
and it tells you what you must make.
So yeah, there is this timeline between 1989 and 90,
when I first conceived of the concept of a revival field,
and then to 93,
which is all the subsequent experiments
that needed to be done.
And if you look at my history,
you'll see that I have no signature,
I'm always looking at what to do next.
I'm kind of stumped right now,
so I gotta get busy again. (laughs)
But in other words,
it's sort of like a whole process of always beginning.
And not to be frightful about that,
because of just like the lessons of art
that maybe applied in our time
may lock you into a stylistic or methodology
that as an artist,
you should be free to do whatever you want.
But it can lead you to fields that are far away from you,
and that's okay, you see,
'cause you'll find your way.
So, I hope that kinda answers it.
-: I think we have time for one last brief question,
if anyone has a question?
I want to be mindful of the time.
-: I was just going to say
those last words that you were speaking, Mr. Chin,
really, they're very true
of the scientific process in general, right?
So, creativity infuses the scientific process
kind of at all steps.
And the direction of say, a scientists' career or research
is sort of guided by the openness that you're talking about,
and the willingness
to be able to engage with other disciplines
and think in new ways about a problem.
And that requires a lot of creativity,
but also this sort of relaxation
that you talked a little bit about at the beginning,
that you said informed this particular project,
sort of stepping back
from what you were working on and doing,
and that allowed new things to come in.
And I think that's fundamental
to scientific advancement as well.
-: Well thank you,
because I just wanna say that I'm very familiar
with why "Revival Field" actually was accepted,
was the rigor of peer review.
And I think that's what scientists must...
An artist should know
that scientists have to go through the real deal.
There are bad scientists and good scientists,
you know the papers convey many things.
I learned a lot about a lot by looking through them.
At the same time,
I might have presented something a little bit cavalier
with do whatever you want.
I think what a artist has,
is maybe sometimes no peer review,
but very rigorous self-critical relationships
with one's thoughts and one's history,
the whole history of art,
and the history that you're trying to convey.
So it's almost like, am I gonna do this?
Why am I doing this? And why is it important?
Because you know, "Revival Field",
it was one of those projects that was driven,
I could not only see and feel it,
but I critically understood, not only the need for it,
but what stood the poetic critique.
It had to survive first me,
and then I could share it with the scientists.
And so it was a shared kind of reality
that had to happen for this project.
So I thank you for your thoughts on that.
-: I will say thank you.
Thank you so much
for a really generous and thoughtful,
inspiring presentation, Mr. Chin.
Molly, on behalf of the SSAB.
Professors Anania, Li and Russo,
thank you so much.
Thank you all again for attending.
I really do encourage you to come visit Sheldon
before the exhibition closes.
It runs through July 2nd.
The works are really wonderful to see in person.
Again, we invite you to our final Collection Talk program
of the semester,
which will be a conversation with artist Amanda Ross-Ho
on April 28th, at 5:30.
That will also be on Zoom,
and the registration link is in the chat.
Go.unl.edu/april-28.
With that, thank you.
Have a wonderful evening.