The Art 21 blog has a good round-up of Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill project.
As a part of Chin’s ongoing efforts to work within the educational community, his site Fundred.org offers downloadable pdf files of blank “fundred-dollar bills.”
Art educators can download the blank bills, and work with students to create new artworks. The students’ work is collected and bundled by the teachers into hundred counts.
Chin’s organization collects the bundles at various depots around the country, and in spring 2009 they will be delivered by armored truck to the Federal Reserve in D.C. The project organizers will request an even exchange from the government to support recovery efforts in New Orleans.
Windmill-tilting aside, this is a great piece. But it’s also a very strong example of the use of printed matter in a relational context. When prints of any sort are used in this way, it connects currents in recent art to the history of printmaking as a communications medium. This history is perhaps the aspect of print that is most relevant to us now, given that we live in the Platinum Age of communication. Yet to some artists and scholars it’s little more than an afterthought. What am I saying? More smart prints, please!
Otis College of Art and Design and The Accelerated Charter Elementary School
(ACES) in Los Angeles are working together on the Fundred Dollar Bill Project.
http://www.otis.edu
http://www.accelerated.org/
You can view some of the Otis/ACES photos here:
http://www.transformaprojects.org/ACESOTIS+fundred+dollar+bill+project