Part Two of Public Art Lecture Series

Jean Shin makes art out of other people’s trash. The New York-based artist told a crowd at SPACE Gallery in Portland that she has also asked people for their sports trophies, dinner plates, lottery scratch cards, even the clothes off their backs. Shin’s talk, sponsored by Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance, was part of the Public Art Event Series celebrating 30 years of public art in Maine, funded by the Maine Arts Commission. Shin’s work involves the tactility of everyday objects that are often discarded or go unnoticed. She collects these elements, then deconstructs and repurposes them to offer a new perspective. For Celadon Remnants, a public art piece installed at the MTA station in Flushing, Queens, New York, she collected three tons of pottery shards from Korea (more trash), and created multiple mosaics that reflect the fragmentation and rejoining of Korean immigrants in the United States. About the public’s response, the artist said, “The conversation in the community really is the meaning of the piece for me.”
A 1999 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Shin currently has a one-woman show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.