Who is the GALA Committee?
Who Did This | How it Happened

GALA'S COMMUNICATION NETWORK—Ideas were faxed to members all over the country. When agreed upon, the ideas were turned into artworks and shipped to the Melrose set for insertion.

The GALA Committee was organized by noted artist Mel Chin while he was serving as the Lamar Dodd Chair of Visual Arts at the University of Georgia in Athens. In 1994, Chin was invited to participate in Uncommon Sense: an exhibition at LA's MOCA slated to open in March of '97. Other exhibitors included Karen Finely, Ann Carlson & Mary Ellen Strom, Rick Lowe, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the Cornerstone Theater Company. Curated by Julie Lazar and Tom Finkelpearl, Uncommon Sense was organized to spotlight new forms of public art.
     CalArts, the infamous avant-garde school which produced the likes of Mike Kelly and Pee Wee Herman, had awarded Chin the Herb Albert Award in Visual Arts, which took him from Athens to teach a two week workshop at the Valencia campus. Chin's workshop, cryptically titled "Striptease: Not the Movie", served as a litmus test for his idea to transform Primetime television into a public art space. After two weeks, strategies were developed, work was produced and a "host" was obtained. Deborah Siegel, Melrose's Set Decorator, agreed to place the student's art on the show—conveniently filmed less than a mile from CalArts at Santa Clarita Studios.
     With the project quickly taking shape, Chin decided to erase his name from the MOCA show and invited his students from CalArts and UGA to exhibit collectively with him at Uncommon Sense as the GALA Committee (GA for Georgia and LA for Los Angeles).
     Once MOCA's president, Richard Koshalek, agreed to waive the museum's bylaws with stipulated "no student artwork", the GALA Committee quickly grew to include other artists and scholars from New York, Houston and Kansas City—not to mention the writers and producers of Melrose Place.