At Slate, Isaac Butler writes about the GALA Committee’s In The Name Of The Place, an art project in which they literally placed activist art in the 1990s night time soap, Melrose Place. “Over Melrose Place’s fourth and fifth seasons, the GALA Committee wound up smuggling more than 100 pieces of subversive art—VHS boxes marked STD, a baby’s crib mobile designed to look like an enormous remote control, a painting of “fireflies” based on the U.S. military’s bombing of Baghdad—onto American television screens. Some of the artworks were quite small—a cigar box that couldn’t be opened, for example, symbolically referencing the Cuban embargo—but some were massive. GALA went to the set of Shooters, the local watering hole frequented by the show’s characters, and relabeled all of its liquor bottles with works meant to document the intertwined histories of slavery, agribusiness, and alcohol in the United States. The committee designed an ad campaign for D&D called ‘Family Values,’ which featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children. (The ‘campaign’ won the character of Billy a fictional advertising award.)”

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