Cradle, developed by Mel Chin in collaboration with SOURCE Studio, will be an opportunity to greet, meet and eat, responding to curiosity about place and a wider world of cuisine and ideas. Hosted at Mel Chin Studio, the site of a former community center and maternity hospital in Egypt Township, North Carolina, the project invites those who were born in the old hospital to gather around shared histories, partake in a meal, and generate a work of art together. In doing so, Chin invites us to imagine a climate of nurturing and connection in a divided time. Cradle is part of Why We Gather, a yearlong series of artist-led gatherings taking place across twelve rural communities in the United States between August 2026 and July 2027.
The project reimagines the cradle as a place where ideas, relationships, and communities are brought into being. The gathering will take place on the second anniversary of Hurricane Helene, underscoring the importance of collective resilience across Western North Carolina. Throughout the day, visitors will be welcomed into Chin’s working studio to see the things he makes, and to experience his creative process. In the lineage of conceptual art, he will invite the community to ideate a new work together.
The main building of Mel Chin Studio was established in 1929 as the Higgins Neighborhood Center, flourishing as a community house, Sunday School, and craft center, later becoming a medical clinic and the maternity center for all of Yancey County in the 1940s. Chin began relocating his fabrication practice to the main stone building in the 1990s. Over the years, he befriended elder members of the area, a few of whom had never ventured far outside the county. Invited to share meals at their family dinners, he would often bring artifacts or stories from his travels as an offering. Through conversation and humor over a dinner table, Chin and his neighbors would exchange ideas and stories, bringing broader perspectives on art, belief, and cultural traditions into dialogue with local lore, craft, and oral histories.
The intention of Cradle is similar: to spark culinary curiosity through new flavors, to open appetites and minds, and to create opportunities to share cultural traditions, perspectives, and local knowledge. To that end, Cradle will feature international food prepared by local chefs, cooking demonstrations, and a traditional Chinese tea tasting.
Through shared dialogue, storytelling, artistic collaboration, and culinary exchange Cradle affirms that communities are continually renewed by the people who gather within them. By returning to a place of beginnings, Chin invites participants to reflect not only on where they come from, but on what they might start together.
