Recent Projects
New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance
This monograph examines a special culinary session that took place at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 1968, one of the rare (and perhaps unique) full cooking courses taught at a major U.S. craft school. The monograph investigates the culinary session’s gendered and racialized relationship to work and labor, its dedication to performance and ephemeral process, and its political contingency in the year 1968.
You can purchase the monograph online from Haystack through this link.
From the essay:
I have taken a forked approach to this project. In this essay, I look at the documentation of the culinary session in order to describe what happened and why, and I also look at Haystack’s plan for the session and describe what did not happen and why not. Additionally, I have imagined alternate histories for the culinary session that might have given us a different future than the one we’re living in. I recorded a series of “cooking show” videos that insert three elements that were crucially absent in 1968: the presence of a South Asian woman to teach her own cuisine, a consideration of cooking as performance art, and advice in at-home entertaining for queer house parties.5 Looking back at the culinary session from over fifty years later, I am rewriting craft history to include the kitchen. I am finding the traces of craft futures we might have had and feeding my hope for the futures we might yet cook up.
The monograph is accompanied by three “cooking show” videos recreate historical recipes from the 1968 special culinary seminar. The videos are available on YouTube and the recipe cards are included in the print monograph.
Between You and Me at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
You can see my work on hospitality, including objects and texts made for salon dinners, in the group exhibition Between You and Me at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. Curated by Shannon Stratton, this exhibition brings together artists whose work provides care for their communities. Many of my texts are available for download via the JMKAC website.
All photographs courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Dessert Democracy
A “cooking show” made for Between You and Me about two similar substances: money and Jell-O.