The Future is Unwritten: People of America, Initiated by Mel Chin - Fundred Project

While visiting New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2006, artist Mel Chin learned about the silent storm of lead contamination that had been plaguing the city and the rest of the country for decades. Hundreds of thousands of children were being exposed each year, with far reaching consequences that played out over lifetimes. Recognizing the scale of the problem, he saw that existing resources were inadequate to respond. Mel believed that children could be part of the solution, which led to the Fundred Project. Through individual drawings, their voices can be tangibly represented in a powerful call for a lead-free future.

In addition to creating a public display of action-oriented art and inviting community involvement, the initiative has brought together local public health specialists, educators and scientists to talk about the challenges and solutions to lead poisoning.

In 2009-2010, a specially designed armored truck was sent to hundreds of schools, museums and community centers across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Fundreds were collected.

As students handed their Fundreds over to truck guards for safekeeping, schools held events that raised awareness of the gravity and persistence of the lead in our environment. These events gave local elected community, press and officials a chance to connect their local efforts to national participation.

Fundreds offer a visual way to engage around lead poisoning. It’s 2020, and millions are still at risk of lead poisoning. Mel Chin’s concept is simple: express your value and stop lead poisoning.

This message is delivered through outreach, education and artmaking. Lead poisoning leads to learning disabilities, lowered IQ, behavior and attention problems, hearing damage, nervous system and kidney damage, and makes people more prone to violence and crime.

The project has continued for 12 years, reached all 50 US States, amassed more than 480,000 Fundreds, and been brought to our nation’s leaders.

Fundred was designed to especially encourage and highlight the voices of children.

Educators from all over the US have brought the project into the classroom to support a variety of learning goals. Fundred is a play on words which combines the words “Fun,” “Fund,” and “Hundred.”

The Fundred Project was launched in 2008 with an initial focus on lead issues in New Orleans. Mel and his team transformed a previously unoccupied house in St. Roch — a New Orleans neighborhood plagued by high levels of lead contamination — into a vault that became project headquarters.

Safehouse became a unique venue for exchange between visitors and neighbors, and the space hosted many events and continuous workspace for the creation and display of Fundreds.

This is an ongoing collective art project made by people across America. Their hand-drawn interpretations of $100 bills are original works of art that together call attention to the danger of childhood lead poisoning and remind us that every child’s future has value.

Created, by the people, for a future free of lead poisoning.

The growing Fundred Collection was brought to Washington, DC in Spring of 2017 for the Fundred Reserve exhibition, held at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design.

Multiple events were held, attended by lawmakers, dozens of congressional staffers, artists, educators, school groups, families, leaders in the arts and health communities, and the public.

Mel Chin (b. 1951, Houston, Texas) 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. In 1989, he developed Revival Field, a project that was a pioneer in the field of “green remediation,” the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. From 1995 to 1998 Chin formed a collective that produced In the Name of the Place, a conceptual public art project conducted on the popular prime-time TV series, Melrose Place. In KNOWMAD, Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic people facing cultural disappearance, and his hand-drawn,24-minute film, 9-11/9-11, won the prestigious Pedro Sienna Award—the “Oscar” of Chile—for best animation in 2007. A current project, Fundred, focuses on national awareness and prevention of childhood lead-poisoning through art-making. Mel is also well known for his iconic sculptures and installations, works that often address the importance of memory and collective identity, and for inserting art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and most recently working with advanced augmented reality (AR) technology, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. A multi-venue exhibition of Mel’s work titled All Over the Place was presented in New York City in 2018. He has received many honors, grants and awards, most recently a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.