Mel Chin's Look at Destruction and Hope

Mel Chin’s work speaks to the ways in which communities—human and animal, ecological and urban, colonized and colonizer—are at each other’s mercy. In his new exhibit All Over the Place, which opened Sunday at the Queens Museum, Chin examines how the actions of one group can devastate another. But he also pays careful attention to the mirror images of destruction: the ability to hope, and to rebuild.

“There’s a lot of artists working in the social-political field, and it’s a little bit of a hammer to the head sometimes,” said Manon Slome, a curator of the exhibit and the founder of No Longer Empty, a nonprofit that transforms New York City spaces into pop-up galleries. “What’s incredible about Mel is that he’s a consummate craftsman. His mind, his aesthetic, is really beautiful, so there’s a kind of seducing you into the artwork.”