Hidden Inside Melrose Place , a Subversive Art Show

A clandestine group inserting subliminal messaging into media to further their agenda might seem like a plotline right out of the ’90s soap Melrose Place. As far-fetched as it seems, Slate reporter Isaac Butler tells the story of “In the Name of the Place,” an avantgarde project that slipped over 100 pieces of subversive art onto the primetime show. It starts with Mel Chin, an art professor who was pondering the nation’s cultural connectivity during a flight between classes he taught in Georgia and LA. What if an art exhibit could exist outside a gallery and instead on television, imprinting on viewers the way product placement does? When he returned home, his wife was watching a show with a blonde actress, Heather Locklear. “I didn’t know who that was, but she moved her head and there was a painting behind her,” he recalls. He decided right then his project would be on Melrose Place.

Chin and his students formed a secret group called the GALA (Georgia-LA) Committee, then cold-called the show’s set designer until she agreed to let the team prepare props. The pieces they designed carried messaging on the kind of weighty social topics that never made it onto the high-drama show—issues like abortion, gun violence, and the AIDS epidemic. After some pieces made it onscreen—including a quilt bearing the chemical structure of the abortion pill RU-486, furniture that resembled the endangered spotted owl, a painting of fireflies based on the US bombing of Baghdad, etc.—an executive producer caught wind, but instead of shutting it down, he invited the group into the production process. The prop messages were so subtle, they flew under the radar until a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit in Los Angeles displayed the project. Executive producer Aaron Spelling was finally clued in, and he was not pleased. Read the full story, which includes images from the two-plus-years project. (Or check out other longforms.)