Melrose Place: That's The Gallery!

For two years, the eternally popular American soap opera Melrose Place was also an undercover exhibition venue for Conceptual Art. In 1995, artist Mel Chin convinced the show’s set decorator to let him place art objects with loaded political content on the set.

Chin got the idea for this brilliant scheme (a work of Conceptualism all its own) while flipping channels with his wife. Seeing a television scene that took place in front of a painting, he suddenly remarked: “That’s the gallery".

The artists Chin invited to contribute to the show ranged from students to famous artists to theorists. The works were carefully chosen for their visual content that reflected, and often complicated, content of different scenes in the show. And the show itself evolved in tandem. One 1997 episode took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art LA, during an exhibition with artwork specially made for the episode.

This golden nugget of pop culture history has recently been unearthed due to an exhibition at Red Bull Studios in New York City, which features 100 of the works Chin chose for the soap.