I’m rarely one for hard-to-defend superlatives, but I feel very comfortable saying that Ashton Phillips is the most exciting under-the-radar artist working in greater Los Angeles today. We met at an opening a few years ago and then I visited his studio, where I managed to check my severe entomophobia long enough to be totally mystified, entranced, and impressed by Ashton’s work with mealworms. Yes, mealworms. By some magic, they can eat through Styrofoam, poop it out, and not only survive, but remain safe for human consumption as an alternative food source. (If eating worms sounds nuts, well, plenty of people are already doing it and they don’t seem half-bad if you can get over the aesthetic issues.)

Anyway, Ashton collaborates with mealworms to make installations, objects, and performances as part of a broader practice oriented towards trans-informed worldbuilding and environmental repair. I could contextualize his work in many ways, but I’m sure my own interest was based in part on his strong kinship with Joseph Beuys, who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation and a show I co-curated for the Broad in 2024. Both artists are deeply invested in alchemical transformation, ingestion (with all of its sacramental overtones), and interspecies collaboration, among other ideas, and I love how Ashton merges those images, processes, and metaphors with queer and trans theory to situate his practice in a very different context, with different — and no less important — stakes. It’s rare work that is philosophically rich while also remaining grounded in endless material exploration and experimentation.

I hope you enjoy our conversation, which I’ve edited lightly for clarity and trimmed to fit Gmail’s annoying data limits. You can read the full version — worth every word! — on Substack.

Your recent show at the downtown LA gallery Persons Unknown brings together so many different threads in your practice. What was the starting point for the show, and how are all the elements related?

Since the first laws attempting to criminalize drag and gender-affirming care started cropping up around the United States in 2022 or so, I’ve been thinking about monsoons and superblooms as instances of collective power that can come out of nowhere and bring about enormous change and rebirth after long periods of intense adversity. This April, I made a pilgrimage to Death Valley to experience my first “superbloom.” It was otherworldly and not what I expected. I met, spent time with, and filmed thousands of thin, bright flowers, shimmering in the wind, floating almost like ghosts or mirages over an endless dry brown ground. They felt magical but also deeply fragile, like a breath or a song or a tear, that was not meant to last for more than a moment.

Within these flowers, though, I was surprised to find at least as many caterpillars happily nibbling, dozing, cozying up, rolling, slipping, and crawling around. I had no expectation of meeting these metamorphosing creatures when I arrived and no data or wifi signal to look up what they might be, so I encountered them without any preconceived notions of who they were, where they came from, or what they might become. This unknowing made room for lasting curiosity, wonder, and delight.

I later learned that these caterpillars were destined to transform into white-lined sphinx moths, nocturnal pollinators of the superbloom flowers and other desert plants, and that they, too, could survive a decade of drought in a kind of suspended animation under the desert floor waiting for the rains. These moths mate and lay eggs for the next generation of pupae who will wait until the next monsoon to emerge and gorge themselves on flowers.

The pupae suspended in “Lord of the Butterflies” at Persons Unknown are live-sculpted from the pupal form of these caterpillars that I ordered from a breeder when I got back to LA. I lived with these pupae, took care of them in my house, and carried them around with me for several months in a bucket of dirt, introducing their twirling, twitching, incubating bodies to my students, sharing them with audiences at performances and exhibitions, and strapping them into the safety belt of the passenger’s seat beside me as I drove to and from the studio everyday. The pupae sculptures are cast with unfired clay, the seeds of superbloom flowers, dehydrated mealworms, and post-plastic mealworm frass (i.e., waste from my colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworms), and then coated in a nutritive film of egg tempera and iron-rich mineral oxides.

The loud buzzing hum and fluttering reverberating throughout the gallery come from audio recordings I made of the moths that emerged from these pupae. One of the pupae emerged from its chrysalis in my hand and lived with me loose inside my house for its full two weeks of life. I slept in the living room while it was alive, so that I could wake up in the middle of the night and catch it flying around and eating nectar from the flowers I foraged for it during the day.

This moth also died in my hand making eye contact with me as it laid four little green eggs. The body of this dead/alive moth is also a part of this show, laid to rest inside a ceramic bowl of water I suspended at the entrance to the main gallery like a basin of holy water. I filled this vessel with seawater from the lagoon near my house and several stems of superbloom flowers the moth ate during its life, and laid the moth to rest on a pink flower petal just above the surface of the water. A transducer on the base of the suspended bowl reverberated the water, flower, and moth with the sounds this moth made when it was alive.

Like so much of my work, the dead/alive moth and flowers in vibrating water, the reverberating hum and fluttering coming from the walls, and the suspended earthen seed pupae transformed the space into a speculative temple of material transmutation, wonder, and grief, where time moves in multiple directions. The rest of the show flowed from that sense.

When I visited Persons Unknown with you, I accepted a frog sacrament — a jelly cube with a boba “egg” inside. What does it feel like to put art in someone’s mouth or to watch people eat your art?

Love this question. I’ve been researching proto-trans, non-binary, and intersex deities and their sex-shifting, queer plant and animal consorts for the last few years, building out a speculative, sometimes kinky, trans*ecological mystery cult as a new vein in my practice. The frog egg sacraments come from that research and cult-building. In January, I performed an hour-long speculative “liturgy” called Shapeshifter at 2220 Arts + Archives as part of Poetic Research Bureau’s Communicator Series, curated by Emji Saint Spero. That performance included a speculative liturgical text, weaving together facts about these ancient deities and their shapeshifting animal and plant consorts with related poetic Commandments, and live material alchemy/food prep. I included three “sacraments” in that performance: one to drink, one to eat, and one to “mark” the audience.

The frog sacrament comes from my research and writing on the Ancient Egyptian god Hapi, an intersex or proto-trans god of the Nile’s inundation who was depicted with the “false beard” of male gods, “round pendulous breasts,” and a “pregnant belly.” His animal consorts include the frog — a creature known to regularly change sex in the wild — and the blue Nile lotus — a flower that grows in anoxic mud and has been used since ancient times as an aphrodisiac and treatment for erectile dysfunction. Hapi’s frogs became extra compelling as subject matter to me when I compared how the Bible characterizes these slimy, sex-changing animals. They are sent as a plague in the Book of Exodus to punish the Egyptians for imprisoning the Israelites. In the Book of Revelations, frogs come out the mouths of three people, signaling the beginning of the End of Days.

When I read this passage, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what I want to see happen. I want to see all those suppressed frogs trapped inside all these people come out of their mouths and show me their slimy miracles. The frog sacrament you accepted and the neon sign commandment hanging above them (“Come out now the mouths of your captors. Show me your slimy miracles”) are materializations of that vision.

I like imagining that the act of putting these ambiguous colorful, nearly opaque, slightly sweet, gelatinous cubes of blue Nile lotus tea, bee pollen, and salty, slimy “real and true” frog eggs into the mouths of the public might be sufficiently disruptive, intimate, and strange to unlock some queer trickster energy buried inside them. Or at least tickle a suppressed curiosity about bodily uncertainty, impurification, and possibility.

It’s satisfying to watch people eat my art. You can tell it is a strange experience for most of them, a little awkward, a little scary, sometimes silly, sometimes intimate. Some are surprised by it or shy. A few were disgusted by unexpected flavors or textures. Several thought it tasted good. Some camped it up and performed queer maximalist delight. Many were fixated on trying to guess what exactly it was, which created room for layers of performativity and play.

I presented the object as the “real and true body of frog,” referencing the consecration and adoration script from Catholic practice. Several playfully penitent and pious participants responded: “body of frog.”

Other foodstuffs appear in this show and across your practice, including buttermilk, which you’ve used to create an opaque projection screen on the gallery’s windows, and mealworms, here embedded in chrysalis-like sculptures and alluded to in bottles of frass, aka mealworm poop, which is a by-product of your work with mealworms and Styrofoam. What is it about food or consumption that holds power in your practice?

Focusing on food, hunger, and consumption helps me reframe the nature of embodiment.

We are literally constructed out of the material we consume. Every cell in my or your body used to be something else. The fat in my brain cells coating my neurons so that I can actually think used to be fat in a mealworm or a fish or a peanut. The proteins in our genitals, the iron in our blood, even the material that makes up the strands of protein in our DNA used to be part of another different being. This material gets into the system that is my or your body through food. We think of our ancestors as individual humans, but our bodies are really materially descended from the water we drink and the food we eat, including all the hormone-shifting, carcinogenic pollutants contained in that water and food. None of that tissue is stable or fundamentally “yours.”

Eating and feeding are also deeply sensual, somatic experiences that can elicit fear/threat/trust, desire/hunger, pleasure/disgust, and literally collapse the distance between the viewer, the art, and the artist. We often think of desire and even pleasure as fundamentally human, sexual or maybe consumerist impulses — something we should probably distrust and likely repress for the good of earth and our physical, psychological, and financial health. But hunger, desire, and pleasure animate all living things, holding us together in complex ecosystems of material exchange and transmutation. This ecosystem of multispecies desire is embedded into every bite of food we consume, including in the blue Nile lotus tea, honey, and bee pollen I’ve brought together in these frog egg sacraments.

I’m also deeply interested in performative feeding as a strangely personal, somatically destabilizing, sometimes awkward encounter that can disrupt the tidy boundaries around “art” and “viewer.” So much of contemporary art engagement has been reduced into a cold, safe, distanced exercise of judging, categorizing, and dissecting “the work.” Many (most?) art viewing customs cater to this judgmental, dissecting, categorizing gaze, which I’ve referred to elsewhere as the cishuman gaze:

Let’s get those lights on really bright and make sure there is nothing in the way to obstruct the view. We will get out all the magnifying glasses, the microscopes, and the expensive projector, so you can see everything really clearly. And make sure there is enough room around the work, so we can look at it in isolation and get far enough away to take it all in from the outside. Turn around for me now. Give me a nice twirl. And don’t forget to smile.

This is a sad, somewhat nasty, version of what the art experience can be that echoes a lot of the competitiveness, jockeying, power games, and scarcity mindset of consumer capitalist culture.

People can try to distance themselves from my work and interrogate what everything “really” is, but I like working with food and feeding because it interrupts/disrupts this default mode of engagement. It’s much harder to stay in that disembodied, hyperverbal, analytical headspace when someone is shoving a slimy “frog” miracle into your mouth or dropping algae-nated “motor oil” on your tongue or offering to mark you with post-plastic ash and landslide mud crawling with roaches.

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Your work often reflects on the state of the planet — this beautiful place with natural environments that are alive and full of magic and mysteries, despite having been wrecked in fundamental ways by capitalism and every other appearance of human arrogance in the world. Somehow, though, I find your work playful and optimistic. Is your work a solution? A personal or collective coping mechanism? Poetry or politics — or both?

Yes, thank you for seeing and feeling this complexity. My work is an act of playful, hopeful, and defiant disobedience that I hope will inspire and make space for other kinds of disobedience. It is a refusal I have been living and nurturing since I was four years old and first told my parents I was a boy: a refusal of normalcy, comportment, acceptability, the obligation to perform “nice” behavior and create “nice” things, to reduce myself or my work to a straightforward story for easy digestibility, or to ignore the magic and changeability of the world/our bodies/language. In a world where doom, dread, and shame are omnipresent and the apathy, despair, and isolation they breed are politically useful to existing power structures, the hopeful playfulness you sense is the disobedience.

I don’t think of my work as a solution to a particular applied problem — e.g., plastic pollution — although it sometimes passes as solution-oriented. It is an effort to find a way of surviving these times without losing the parts I love most about myself and others, including the possibility of imagining a better, more livable world. That sounds a bit like a coping mechanism, but the impacts of my practice matter to me, too. And I want to be more than a salve for myself or others.

The work is an effort to find and share a way to “stay with the trouble” of living and dying in this age of capitalism-fueled mass extinction, not an offering of easy solutions or an assurance that everything will be ok, but a reminder or proof that there is so much magic, beauty, intimacy, surprise, wonder, curiosity, and defiant vitality/mutation/adaptation, absurdity, play, humor, and pleasure to be found within and among the world, especially if we are brave enough to look at all the death and suffering coursing around and within us. Like transness, a lot of this magic happens at the edges of life and death, pleasure and pain.

So the work is more of an ongoing opera/symphony/poetry for the end of the world than a strategic political campaign. But I know every work of art is political to the extent it either reinforces the status quo and existing distributions of power or challenges them, and I embrace the deeply political significance of my work, especially now in this time of raging, global anti-trans animus.

My understanding of my work is also informed by my time as a practicing attorney. This work is not a linear argument or case for a particular outcome, a moralistic lecture designed to shame you into action, or doom porn designed to titillate your nihilism or collectively absolve us of responsibility for any action because everything is going to hell anyway.

It is more like a contagion or a vector for a subjectivity, attitude, wisdom, and knowledge that can be transmitted through shared air, touch, food, and feeling, like a virus. Like, you are going to come into this show and I will try to infect you or inoculate you with a virus/vaccine that will help you mutate or adapt into a different kind of creature. If it works, you’ll leave as a carrier for something you didn’t have before. Months or years later, it might explode from you like spores from fruiting fungi or come out of your mouth as a fully formed frog you didn’t quite realize you were carrying.

Thank you for reading! If that excerpt left you wanting more, give this post a like (please and thank you) and then check out the full interview on Weekly Special’s homepage.

If you want to learn more about Ashton’s work, check out his website and follow him on Instagram. And if you enjoyed this issue of Weekly Special, please share and subscribe!

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All images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.

Your recent show at the downtown LA gallery Persons Unknown brings together so many different threads in your practice. What was the starting point for the show, and how are all the elements related?

Since the first laws attempting to criminalize drag and gender-affirming care started cropping up around the United States in 2022 or so, I’ve been thinking about monsoons and superblooms as instances of collective power that can come out of nowhere and bring about enormous change and rebirth after long periods of intense adversity. This April, I made a pilgrimage to Death Valley to experience my first “superbloom.” It was otherworldly and not what I expected. I met, spent time with, and filmed thousands of thin, bright flowers, shimmering in the wind, floating almost like ghosts or mirages over an endless dry brown ground. They felt magical but also deeply fragile, like a breath or a song or a tear, that was not meant to last for more than a moment.

Within these flowers, though, I was surprised to find at least as many caterpillars happily nibbling, dozing, cozying up, rolling, slipping, and crawling around. I had no expectation of meeting these metamorphosing creatures when I arrived and no data or wifi signal to look up what they might be, so I encountered them without any preconceived notions of who they were, where they came from, or what they might become. This unknowing made room for lasting curiosity, wonder, and delight.

I later learned that these caterpillars were destined to transform into white-lined sphinx moths, nocturnal pollinators of the superbloom flowers and other desert plants, and that they, too, could survive a decade of drought in a kind of suspended animation under the desert floor waiting for the rains. These moths mate and lay eggs for the next generation of pupae who will wait until the next monsoon to emerge and gorge themselves on flowers.

The pupae suspended in “Lord of the Butterflies” at Persons Unknown are live-sculpted from the pupal form of these caterpillars that I ordered from a breeder when I got back to LA. I lived with these pupae, took care of them in my house, and carried them around with me for several months in a bucket of dirt, introducing their twirling, twitching, incubating bodies to my students, sharing them with audiences at performances and exhibitions, and strapping them into the safety belt of the passenger’s seat beside me as I drove to and from the studio everyday. The pupae sculptures are cast with unfired clay, the seeds of superbloom flowers, dehydrated mealworms, and post-plastic mealworm frass (i.e., waste from my colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworms), and then coated in a nutritive film of egg tempera and iron-rich mineral oxides.

The loud buzzing hum and fluttering reverberating throughout the gallery come from audio recordings I made of the moths that emerged from these pupae. One of the pupae emerged from its chrysalis in my hand and lived with me loose inside my house for its full two weeks of life. I slept in the living room while it was alive, so that I could wake up in the middle of the night and catch it flying around and eating nectar from the flowers I foraged for it during the day.

This moth also died in my hand making eye contact with me as it laid four little green eggs. The body of this dead/alive moth is also a part of this show, laid to rest inside a ceramic bowl of water I suspended at the entrance to the main gallery like a basin of holy water. I filled this vessel with seawater from the lagoon near my house and several stems of superbloom flowers the moth ate during its life, and laid the moth to rest on a pink flower petal just above the surface of the water. A transducer on the base of the suspended bowl reverberated the water, flower, and moth with the sounds this moth made when it was alive.

Like so much of my work, the dead/alive moth and flowers in vibrating water, the reverberating hum and fluttering coming from the walls, and the suspended earthen seed pupae transformed the space into a speculative temple of material transmutation, wonder, and grief, where time moves in multiple directions. The rest of the show flowed from that sense.

When I visited Persons Unknown with you, I accepted a frog sacrament—a jelly cube with a boba “egg” inside. What does it feel like to put art in someone’s mouth or to watch people eat your art?

Love this question. I’ve been researching proto-trans, non-binary, and intersex deities and their sex-shifting, queer plant and animal consorts for the last few years, building out a speculative, sometimes kinky, trans*ecological mystery cult as a new vein in my practice. The frog egg sacraments come from that research and cult-building. In January, I performed an hour-long speculative “liturgy” called Shapeshifter at 2220 Arts + Archives as part of Poetic Research Bureau’s Communicator Series, curated by Emji Saint Spero. That performance included a speculative liturgical text, weaving together facts about these ancient deities and their shapeshifting animal and plant consorts with related poetic Commandments, and live material alchemy/food prep. I included three “sacraments” in that performance: one to drink, one to eat, and one to “mark” the audience.

The frog sacrament comes from my research and writing on the Ancient Egyptian god Hapi, an intersex or proto-trans god of the Nile’s inundation who was depicted with the “false beard” of male gods, “round pendulous breasts,” and a “pregnant belly.” His animal consorts include the frog — a creature known to regularly change sex in the wild — and the blue Nile lotus — a flower that grows in anoxic mud and has been used since ancient times as an aphrodisiac and treatment for erectile dysfunction. Hapi’s frogs became extra compelling as subject matter to me when I compared how the Bible characterizes these slimy, sex-changing animals. They are sent as a plague in the Book of Exodus to punish the Egyptians for imprisoning the Israelites. In the Book of Revelations, frogs come out the mouths of three people, signaling the beginning of the End of Days.

When I read this passage, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what I want to see happen. I want to see all those suppressed frogs trapped inside all these people come out of their mouths and show me their slimy miracles. The frog sacrament you accepted and the neon sign commandment hanging above them (“Come out now the mouths of your captors. Show me your slimy miracles”) are materializations of that vision.

I like imagining that the act of putting these ambiguous colorful, nearly opaque, slightly sweet, gelatinous cubes of blue Nile lotus tea, bee pollen, and salty, slimy “real and true” frog eggs into the mouths of the public might be sufficiently disruptive, intimate, and strange to unlock some queer trickster energy buried inside them. Or at least tickle a suppressed curiosity about bodily uncertainty, impurification, and possibility.

It’s satisfying to watch people eat my art. You can tell it is a strange experience for most of them, a little awkward, a little scary, sometimes silly, sometimes intimate. Some are surprised by it or shy. A few were disgusted by unexpected flavors or textures. Several thought it tasted good. Some camped it up and performed queer maximalist delight. Many were fixated on trying to guess what exactly it was, which created room for layers of performativity and play.

I presented the object as the “real and true body of frog,” referencing the consecration and adoration script from Catholic practice. Several playfully penitent and pious participants responded: “body of frog.”

Tell me more about the religious overtones in your work, which extend far beyond the frog sacrament.

I grew up Catholic, but I also have Quaker and Unitarian ancestors. I think a lot about the magic and alchemical practices in Catholicism as a foil for my work. I grew up being told, for example, that a priest could turn bread into the real and true body of Christ by reciting a few simple words and gestures. And it did seem to me that the bread we were offered as Eucharist had fundamentally changed through the consecration. At the same time, I was being told that the materiality of my body could not be changed through any kind of ritual or material alchemy. It always seemed like more of a stretch to believe that bread could become God than that I could become a man. But maybe both are true.

I also think about the hypocrisy of anti-trans zealots fixated on the literalness of trans bodies, calling us delusional and saying we will never be whatever sex we say we are because a man is a man is a man and a woman is a woman is a woman. Or something like that. They talk about genitals as destiny and chromosomes as truth, and delight at transvestigating the details of strangers’ bodies to identify an endless string of physical signs that the person is “lying,” “faking,” or “deceiving” the public. Often the people targeted by these “transvestigations” are not even trans, like the wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, but that doesn’t seem to bother them — they are thirsty for trans blood and will drink whatever they find.

At the same time, many of these anti-trans crusaders insist that every person has a “soul” that is immaterial and separate from their physical body and that this “soul” is so real it has the capacity to live forever in a magical afterlife long after their material body has turned to dust. They say they believe in an immaterial plane of existence where humans can communicate with God, Jesus, saints, and the dead, maybe. And they say they believe in miracles — that God could cure them or their loved ones of cancer, for example, or make them rich through divine intervention.

But sex cannot exist in this immaterial plane detached from someone’s physical body, just their immaterial and immortal soul? And God cannot transform a trans person into anything other than the sex some arbitrary human assigned to them on a paper form at birth? This thinking is an insult to God.

Trans people have been considered sacred and magical since the beginning of time often because we show the potential of humans to move beyond our mundane and materially prescribed limits. When I reference quasi-Catholic and other religious practices and aesthetics in my work — a frog egg sacrament; fungal holy water; marking the penitent with post-plastic ash; altar/alter painting; egg tempera frescoes; metal-plated reliquaries; the triptych; an enormous clay lingam-like pillar performing a polyvocal track of sex-changing crocodile, frog, and dolphin recordings processed through human-voice filters — I want to appropriate these practices to point to the sacredness and real magic in the world: the magic of trans people; plastic-metabolizing mealworms; superbloom moths and wildflowers that can survive ten years underground with no food or water waiting for the rain; sex-changing frogs covered in hallucinatory goo who emerge with the floods; the blue Nile lotus flowers that can grow in thick anoxic mud, attracting metamorphosing beetles with their intoxicating scent and producing psychoactive properties to relieve anxiety and improve sex in humans; the majestic and fierce crocodile shifting sex with the water. I also hope that these usurpations of religious aesthetics open up space for people to imagine weirder, more emancipatory forms of divinity for themselves, while we antagonize the hypocritical and malicious gender fundamentalists.

Humans have been inventing gods and ritual practices for tens of thousands of years — long before Catholicism. Art is one of the places people seek out and maybe find or create divinity. I’m less interested in a cosmic god with a name and a face and a palace in the sky than I am in the collective earthly impulse/experience to find/feel/hear God in the living world around us and the practice of listening deeply to the earthly world around us to find/feel/hear the magic and majesty that is already there. I’m also more interested in the somatic and multisensory experience of a cobbled-together, broken, queer, buzzing, kinky sacredness than forming or leading an actual church with a parking lot, meeting minutes, and a fundraising agenda.

All of which makes me think about McKenzie Wark and Luce de Lire’s recent writing on temporary and surreal utopias as spaces that can’t be formalized, permanent, stable, or even really sensical. Maybe each artist’s practice is their own eccentric, idiosyncratic religion or flickering imperfect utopia.

Other foodstuffs also appear in this show and across your practice, including buttermilk, which you’ve used to create an opaque projection screen on the gallery’s windows, and mealworms, here embedded in chrysalis-like sculptures and alluded to in bottles of frass, aka mealworm poop, which is a by-product of your work with mealworms and Styrofoam. What is it about food or consumption that holds power in your practice?

Focusing on food, hunger, and consumption helps me reframe the nature of embodiment.

We are literally constructed out of the material we consume. Every cell in my or your body used to be something else. The fat in my brain cells coating my neurons so that I can actually think used to be fat in a mealworm or a fish or a peanut. The proteins in our genitals, the iron in our blood, even the material that makes up the strands of protein in our DNA used to be part of another different being. This material gets into the system that is my or your body through food. We think of our ancestors as individual humans, but our bodies are really materially descended from the water we drink and the food we eat, including all the hormone-shifting, carcinogenic pollutants contained in that water and food. None of that tissue is stable or fundamentally “yours.”

Eating and feeding are also deeply sensual, somatic experiences that can elicit fear/threat/trust, desire/hunger, pleasure/disgust, and literally collapse the distance between the viewer, the art, and the artist. We often think of desire and even pleasure as fundamentally human, sexual or maybe consumerist impulses — something we should probably distrust and likely repress for the good of earth and our physical, psychological, and financial health. But hunger, desire, and pleasure animate all living things, holding us together in complex ecosystems of material exchange and transmutation. This ecosystem of multispecies desire is embedded into every bite of food we consume, including in the blue Nile lotus tea, honey, and bee pollen I’ve brought together in these frog egg sacraments.

I’m also deeply interested in performative feeding as a strangely personal, somatically destabilizing, sometimes awkward encounter that can disrupt the tidy boundaries around “art” and “viewer.” So much of contemporary art engagement has been reduced into a cold, safe, distanced exercise of judging, categorizing, and dissecting “the work.” Many (most?) art viewing customs cater to this judgmental, dissecting, categorizing gaze, which I’ve referred to elsewhere as the cishuman gaze:

Let’s get those lights on really bright and make sure there is nothing in the way to obstruct the view. We will get out all the magnifying glasses, the microscopes, and the expensive projector, so you can see everything really clearly. And make sure there is enough room around the work, so we can look at it in isolation and get far enough away to take it all in from the outside. Turn around for me now. Give me a nice twirl. And don’t forget to smile.

This is a sad, somewhat nasty, version of what the art experience can be that echoes a lot of the competitiveness, jockeying, power games, and scarcity mindset of consumer capitalist culture.

People can try to distance themselves from my work and interrogate what everything “really” is, but I like working with food and feeding because it interrupts/disrupts this default mode of engagement. It’s much harder to stay in that disembodied, hyperverbal, analytical headspace when someone is shoving a slimy “frog” miracle into your mouth or dropping algae-nated “motor oil” on your tongue or offering to mark you with post-plastic ash and landslide mud crawling with roaches.

The buttermilk window is different because I’m not actually feeding the window surface to people, although licking the buttermilk window as a devotional gesture or performance of hunger/desire sounds pretty fun. It’s also a good example of how I invite materials to perform in my installations and my continuing amusement and delight when materials perform as something different from their assigned or expected state or purpose. Here, multiple viewers remarked to me that the veil of drippy smeared buttermilk looks more like a different kind of bodily fluid/slimy miracle. I didn’t set out to construct a giant cum veil as a projection surface, but I was amused when that read emerged. What could be better than a veil of milk that emerged from a pregnant cow performing as an illuminated shroud or curtain of semen? I’m interested in how viewers respond to the ambiguity of this bodily material. Do they feel “tricked” or angry when they discover that the “cum” is milk? Or the “frog egg” is boba? Or are they delighted and amused?

Many of the materials, processes, images, and metaphors in your work draw on and elaborate queer and trans theory. You gravitate towards all sorts of things that are non-binary, hermaphroditic, or transmutational—things that really explode binary, hetero, cis, and anthropocentric modes of thinking and worldbuilding (or world-destroying...). Can you talk about the theoretical or philosophical aspects of your work, and how they relate to your deep interests in materials?

Material really is trans. Always shifting, never stable. Always becoming something else. Through a mealworm’s digestive system, for example, even the bonds that hold a molecule of polystyrene plastic together can be broken, and the energy and carbon that were once trapped inside that plastic molecule can be set free to fuel the mealworm’s metamorphosis. Through the mealworm’s embodied alchemy, the polystyrene becomes beetle, shed, and nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich frass waste that can be used as a nutritive fertilizer in any garden.

Trans — as a medical prefix for transgender — was derived from organic chemistry, where “trans” means to switch sides and “cis” means to stay on the same side. All of us have cis and trans molecules in our bodies — in this sense. Human vision actually requires a rapid shifting of cis-molecules into trans-molecules.1

Humans tend to focus our attention on bodies and objects with faces and names that we can turn into characters for the narratives we construct to make meaning out of the world. But all these bodies, names, objects, and characters are fleeting assemblages of flowing, shifting, coursing — i.e., trans — material. This sounds very abstract or even esoteric, but people are fighting wars and stoking genocide over their fixation on the sacrosanct and inviolable truth of these constructed categories.

Your question is about queer and trans theory, but I’m thinking a lot more about genocide right now. I read a book in college called Moral Purity and Persecution in History in a class on “liberalism and its discontents” taught by a psychiatrist-turned-political-philosopher. I think about that book often these days. The book details the ways that concepts of “purity” and “filth” have been used throughout history to justify war and genocide. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger presents an ethnography of similar practices and taboos across a different set of cultures through an anthropologist’s lens.

Transness and queerness are just some of the human practices and subjectivities that have been and are being criminalized and vilified as impure, dirty, filthy, and dangerous, and subjected to campaigns of persecution, erasure, and eradication. I work with dirt, insects, and taboo animal products like insect waste, rotting egg yolks (in the egg tempera on the suspended pupae), and rotting milk (buttermilk on the projected film screen) to push against and activate these notions of purity. I like the spectacle/theatrical strangeness of that as a performance in itself. So often we go into art spaces expecting to be coddled and attended to, with a concierge on hand to explain everything to us, so that all the ambiguity, tension, mystery, challenge, and potential discomfort of the work is resolved for us and we can move on to the next show. I hate that smug tell-me-what-it-means-already-so-I-can-consume-this-work-judge-it-and-you-and-move-on-to-the-next-spectacle vibe.

But it’s also important that the other shoe eventually drops for at least some viewers. All the things I’m putting into these spaces to disquiet, unsettle, unnerve, threaten, and disgust are working some kind of trans and queer magic. The mealworms are metamorphosing themselves and the polystyrene they consume. Their post-plastic waste, presented here as medicine in a row of glass medicine jars on glass shelves, is grotesque, maybe, but the phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon in it is also capable of nourishing plants, fungi, and animals in the soil, and eventually recombining into food that you may eat and, eventually, you.

The moth you are hearing and seeing in the show is from the species that can survive underground in pupa form for a decade with no food or water, just waiting for the rain so that it can emerge and surface at exactly the same time as its food source.

The frog egg sacrament is a performative ritual that is meant to be a little absurd and blasphemous, but it also contains the actual tea of the blue Nile lotus flower — a medicinal plant used since ancient times as an aphrodisiac and to treat a variety of ailments, including erectile dysfunction.

The buttermilk is performing a kind of trans material fertility joke of milk-cum-cum but it’s also demonstrating its miraculous capacity to both hold and transmit projected light, transforming the things we look through (window/glass) (and typically ignore: the invisible “lens”) into a thing we look at, transforming the lens/window into a performing/writing/speaking surface.

The result is not so much a linear argument or rhetorical exposition, but an assemblage of research-based facts, material demonstrations and performances, sensory phenomena, and mischievous queer attitude that I offer the viewer to experience and grapple with. I want this assemblage to challenge or unsettle their expectations of what is beautiful, precious, disgusting, safe, sacred (even), but I also want them to think and feel through the unsettled pieces for themselves. There is no one correct or easy answer I expect them to build with them.

I find permission and solidarity for this nonlinear, sometimes absurd, multisensory and maximalist, deconstructed and deconstructing, affect-forward approach to artmaking in many queer and trans theorists’ work, including Timothy Morton’s writing critiquing judgmental, linear, and straight environmentalist discourse as compounding the ideological paradigms that have brought us to the edge of collapse (see, e.g., All Art is Ecological; and “Queer Ecology”); Luce de Lire’s critique of critique as a spectacle that distracts us from action; and Jack Halberstam’s writing on unworlding, the aesthetics of collapse, and the Queer Art of Failure as necessary and generative processes in themselves.

You have a fascinating background that shows up in your work in subtle but revealing ways. Your undergraduate degree is in anthropology and you went to law school and practiced for some time. How do those experiences inform your artistic practice?

In a lot of ways, I think I’m practicing now the thing I set out to do when I decided to go to law school. I went to law school in my early 20s to push back against the bullies who came for me as a visible queer/trans kid growing up in West Virginia in the 90s, and to try to make the world a more livable place for other kids like me and people like my mom, who died of pollution-linked cancer when I was 26 after being treated like waste by the local plastic factories who forced all of us to breath carcinogenic air for decades just to bolster their profits. I’ve just moved on from the notion that logic, argument, reason, sincerity, or appeals to abstract concepts like fairness or justice will persuade anyone with power to change anything at all.

I studied and practiced law for almost ten years before turning my attention to art as the primary vehicle for my research, thinking, and public engagement. I worked as a civil prosecutor for the US government, enforcing federal health, safety, worker protection, and anti-fraud laws. I deposed coal mine operators about the conditions that led to mine explosions, corrupt fiduciaries about their elaborate schemes to misappropriate employee investment funds, and Amish roof builders about religious freedom. I argued a novel common law theory before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals before I turned 30; rose for the Honorable Judge Funk in a bankruptcy court in Jacksonville, FL; and questioned a witness on the stand in Reading, PA, during an earthquake. My relationship to material, language, research and performance are deeply influenced by these formative experiences.

Every gallery feels a little like a courtroom or the scene of a crime and every object feels like evidence or a prop for a performance of ceremony and power. Viewers feel like witnesses who might be called on later to testify, clients who need me to show them what’s really going on (good or bad) so that they can make informed decisions about what to do, and/or judge and jury with the power to evaluate my case, render verdicts, and take away or give back life. I sometimes reference the formal aesthetics of legal practice in my work to make these resonances more available to my audience — e.g. in the statement of facts artist book I created for my 2024 solo show “Worm Hole: A Portal for Plastic Bodies.”

I also studied anthropology in undergrad, which influences how I think about the land, material culture, and social customs. I relate to the land as a living, feral archive, and to objects and bodies as material culture that carry information in their physicality well beyond the intentions of their makers, including evidence of more-than-human agencies like fungi, bacteria, water, and mineral/geological forces.

Like a good anthropologist, I think of object- and image-making as cultural practices that are always relational, always ecological, and always collaborative, even if we put the name of a single artist on the gallery window. My objects are not isolated art pieces that I understand as individual sculptures or paintings, but performative interventions that transform the environments around them into something else — and/or as physical scores that invite relational and somatic engagement. The suspended pupae in “Lord of the Butterflies,” e.g., work in both ways: (1) as objects that transform the space of the gallery into a subterranean field of pupation and waiting; and (2) an invitation to the viewer/owner to take this object, wear it, and/or bury it in the ground.

I also think about funerary practices, fertility rites, public space, the monument, and ornament across an anthropologist’s breadth of time and culture. I’m just as likely to think about Göbekli Tepe, with its twelve-foot-tall carved stone animal/human towers; the Crocodile Temples on the Upper Nile filled with mummified Nile crocodiles; the winged phallus mounted on the terracotta red plaster walls of Pompeii; the Rosetta Stone; Hammurabi’s Code; and the mummified beetle/canopic jars as references for my work, as I am to think about Marcel Duchamp or Ana Mendieta or Tracey Emin. My approach to material ecosystems also shares an anthropologist’s perspective; Donna Haraway trained as an anthropologist as did Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Your work often reflects on the state of the planet—this beautiful place with natural environments that are alive and still full of magic and mysteries, despite having been wrecked in fundamental ways by capitalism and every other appearance of human arrogance in the world. Somehow, though, I find your work playful and optimistic. Is your work a solution? A personal or collective coping mechanism? Poetry or politics or both?

Yes, thank you for seeing and feeling this complexity. My work is an act of playful, hopeful, and defiant disobedience that I hope will inspire and make space for other kinds of disobedience. It is a refusal I have been living and nurturing since I was four years old and first told my parents I was a boy: a refusal of normalcy, comportment, acceptability, the obligation to perform “nice” behavior and create “nice” things, to reduce myself or my work to a straightforward story for easy digestibility, or to ignore the magic and changeability of the world/our bodies/language. In a world where doom, dread, and shame are omnipresent and the apathy, despair, and isolation they breed are politically useful to existing power structures, the hopeful playfulness you sense is the disobedience.

I don’t think of my work as a solution to a particular applied problem — e.g., plastic pollution — although it sometimes passes as solution-oriented. It is an effort to find a way of surviving these times without losing the parts I love most about myself and others, including the possibility of imagining a better, more livable world. That sounds a bit like a coping mechanism, but the impacts of my practice matter to me, too. And I want to be more than a salve for myself or others.

The work is an effort to find and share a way to “stay with the trouble” of living and dying in this age of capitalism-fueled mass extinction, not an offering of easy solutions or an assurance that everything will be ok, but a reminder or proof that there is so much magic, beauty, intimacy, surprise, wonder, curiosity, and defiant vitality/mutation/adaptation, absurdity, play, humor, and pleasure to be found within and among the world, especially if we are brave enough to look at all the death and suffering coursing around and within us. Like transness, a lot of this magic happens at the edges of life and death, pleasure and pain.

So the work is more of an ongoing opera/symphony/poetry for the end of the world than a strategic political campaign. But I know every work of art is political to the extent it either reinforces the status quo and existing distributions of power or challenges them, and I embrace the deeply political significance of my work, especially now in this time of raging, global anti-trans animus.

My understanding of my work is also informed by my time as a practicing attorney. This work is not a linear argument or case for a particular outcome, a moralistic lecture designed to shame you into action, or doom porn designed to titillate your nihilism or collectively absolve us of responsibility for any action because everything is going to hell anyway.

It is more like a contagion or a vector for a subjectivity, attitude, wisdom, and knowledge that can be transmitted through shared air, touch, food, and feeling, like a virus. Like, you are going to come into this show and I will try to infect you or inoculate you with a virus/vaccine that will help you mutate or adapt into a different kind of creature. If it works, you’ll leave as a carrier for something you didn’t have before. Months or years later, it might explode from you like spores from fruiting fungi or come out of your mouth as a fully formed frog you didn’t quite realize you were carrying.

What’s your wildest ambition for a work you haven’t yet realized?

I’m dreaming about a speculative refugee camp turned laboratory turned temple where survivors of the Authority’s Normal, Real, and Right eradication campaigns can gather to rest, recover, and begin to develop our own actualizing technologies, archives, and myths. I want to build a working farm laboratory where AfterWorld initiates can reverse-engineer our stolen gender-affirming technologies with live plants, crowd-sourced data, and hacked lab equipment. I’d build a giant lightbox with a suspended mirror above it — part altar, part lectern, part room-sized overhead projector, part stage — within a living library of crowd-sourced science, notes, drawings, poetry, and images, so that anyone can explore the poetics, aesthetics, and science of these technologies as found collages of moving images projected onto the walls and ceiling of the space activated by the public.

There would also be an interspecies oral history and mythmaking station where new initiates could offer their actualizing stories and listen to other survivors’ stories projected from the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a worldmaking/worldbreaking rain. I’m deeply fascinated by animal voices and language, especially the voices of creatures who change sex or embody multiple sexes at once. So this architecturally installed sonic rain would also include channels of voice from crocodiles, frogs, dolphins, sea turtles, and particular species of sex-changing and intersex birds and fish.

The bunker would also include a shrine of speculative posthuman, trans-mythic deities, grown over the life of the exhibition, with materials we develop on site: e.g., yam- and soy-based bioplastics, endocrine-disrupting plastics, and mycelium-reinforced earth seeded with pollution-consuming and hormone-(dis)regulating seeds.

Visitors to the AfterWorld would be treated as refugees and mystery cult initiates who will need to accept three inoculating, impurification sacraments before they are fully admitted into this mysteries: one to impurify the blood, one to impurify the mind, and one to impurify the flesh.

I can also see a chamber of translucent icons derived from histology slides of these sex-changing and nonbinary creatures’ shifting sexual organs that would hang from the ceiling like banners, windows, or mirrors. I’m actually visiting several massive collections of zoological tissue samples in London this month to gather some of the raw material for these composite images.

Ideally, the AfterWorld would be up for a while with several thoughtful ways for viewers to participate in its growth and evolution. I just saw Yoko Ono’s show at the Broad and was really inspired by the variety of playful ways that the “viewer” is invited into her work. There should be regular activations and performances within this AfterWorld, including sessions where I teach people how to care for, propagate, and derive testosterone from yams (apparently there is a mycobacteria that will do this for you); and dinner parties where we cook with the scraps of these plants; Sacrament Tuesdays (or something cheeky like that) when I bring in fresh frog egg sacraments to impurify everyone; and research-informed performances for and by the pollution-metabolizing fungi growing in the shrine, structured using frequencies that have been found to help these fungi grow.

If money and time are no object, I’d also build a living tilapia aquaponic system to nourish the plants and then feed the tilapia to everyone at the end of the show. Among other fascinating things, tilapia come from Hapi’s Nile. When raising Tilapia, it is common practice to add androgens to the water so that all the fish become male. Apparently, male tilapia grow much bigger and much faster than female tilapia, so farmers do this to increase their margins. Tilapia are also regularly fed with mealworms, so it would be super easy to bring this whole ecosystem into material communion with the larger post-plastic one I’ve been growing for the last five years.

So, yeah, just that.

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To learn more about Ashton’s work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram.

Active Cultures, an LA-based non-profit focused on art and food, was hosting a series of recorded conversations called “Food Material,” and invited me, as the founding editor of their publishing platform, Digest, to interview Carmen in her studio for Instagram. We talked about her long walks around a city eerily quieted by Covid, walks that yielded many new works, including prints (and a very long scroll) made with Rx bars and pizza slices. The oils in both foods create Rorschach-like grease stains that morph, when outlined with crayon, into a private symbology. As Carmen put it in her notes at the time, “In walking, I feel that I digest the city, understanding its energy as a process of taking it in and processing it slowly.”

Since moving back to LA in 2021, I’ve engaged quite a bit with Carmen’s work, going deeper for ARTnews on Carmen’s affinity for foodstuffs — avocado, guava leaves, lemon juice, strawberry syrup, cochineal — as artistic materials, and writing for Artforum about her solo show at the ICA LA in 2023, which included sculptures made from banana peels and other organic matter. Given my strong affinity for her work and the incredibly thoughtful way she moves through the world, I was only too delighted when Carmen asked me to write a text for her first solo gallery show in New York, which opens this Thursday, July 9, at Silverlens. With the gallery’s permission, I’m sharing that text here, punctuated by behind-the-scenes and work-in-progress images Carmen graciously sent me.

Enjoy the sneak peek below!

Carmen Argote: Soft Perimeter, Silverlens, New York

For Carmen Argote’s debut solo gallery show in 2010, she exhibited a 720-square-foot carpet that once covered the floors of her childhood home in Los Angeles, hanging it from the ceiling in the manner of a monumental tapestry. She painted most of the carpet white, leaving a wide strip of the original chestnut brown around the edges; over time, stains from years past bled through the paint, like memories slowly returning to the surface of consciousness.

Many of the formal, material, and conceptual concerns of 720 Sq. Feet: Household Mutations return, refined and elaborated, in the work gathered together for “Soft Perimeter,” Argote’s first solo gallery show in New York. The sculptural object that gives the exhibition its title, Soft perimeter of home (2026), similarly maps a domestic interior: the hybrid home and studio the adult Argote shares with her mother (a frequent collaborator) and a handful of chickens (also collaborators), a space where art making is just one activity among many that sustain the artist’s daily life. Every nook and cranny is filled with personal effects commingled with works-in-progress; it’s this premium on available space that led Soft perimeter of home to wind up coiled on Argote’s bed, taking on the loose infinity shape that it now occupies on the gallery floor. What once traced the edges of the artist’s home has collapsed in self-embrace, its twists and softness calling up the body more acutely than the rigid geometry of architecture.

The foam guts of Soft perimeter of home are externalized and made grotesque in a series of objects, all from 2026, made in part from a foraged foam mattress that Argote originally thought had once belonged to a romantic partner.

Building on her earlier “comforting objects,” small figural sculptures of bundled and knotted organic and found materials, the more recent foam works also employ braiding and binding to create dense forms, but in this case they evoke matter metabolized and expelled—matter of the body rather than a surrogate for the body.

Unlike the earlier comforting objects, these works are unified by Argote’s use of cochineal, a deep red dye harvested from insects, whose usage dates back to the Mayans and Aztecs. When mixed with lemon juice, the dye shifts to vibrant orange, scarlet, gray, and violet, a viscerally intense palette with associations of sun, blood, passion, and death. A number of titles in the series—Matchstick, Please fireweed, Yes Firebasket—reference fire, a force of nature both destructive and sanctifying. Where the comforting objects strongly relate to Argote’s larger project of re-mothering her inner child, the more recent sculptures suggest chemical transformation, nodding to the 2025 wildfires that forever changed the physical and psychological landscape of Los Angeles, and willing, through forms compacted and enclosed, their containment. Twin works on paper, where is the match that sparked the entire terrain (2026), extend the impulse toward control, with even brushstrokes of crimson cochineal creating an allover field of color that envelops the viewer, containing us in the bodily and psychic experience of encounter.

Cochineal, itself derived from a non-human body, constitutes the corporeal throughline of “Soft Perimeter.” Argote imagines the dye as “almost like a body,” behaving similarly to “all kinds of secretions, like hormones and different chemicals, which shift and change our mood.”1 Me at Market (2020), a monumentally scaled work on linen, embodies both the excess of secretion and the magic of material metamorphosis. The work is narrow and impossibly long, much like the intestinal Soft perimeter of home, but with vastly different appearances on recto and verso, not unlike a body.

The “front” is dotted with a grid of linen pockets—similar to those sewn on the artist’s signature jumpsuits—that Argote filled with cochineal and lemon juice, allowing the liquid to bleed downward, leaving behind neat lines of pigment that link one pocket to the next and so on. The “back” of the work is its more chaotic underbelly, where dye and acid swirl in dark mottled pools, beautiful and gruesome all at once. Argote’s orderly pockets—cut and sewn by her mother—suggest holding, harboring, and keeping; but sometimes what is meant to be carried cannot be contained, instead seeping outward, inward, and through, changing everything in its path.

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Thank you for reading! Soft Perimeter opens at Silverlens, New York, on July 9 and remains on view through August 1, 2026. Don’t miss it!

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In reality, the art world and art history are equally capacious, with room for the “merely” decorative and the sharply critical and everything in between: for Matisse’s art “like a good armchair”1 and Warhol’s “Art is anything you can get away with,” as well as for Maciunas’s “REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART” and Laderman-Ukeles’s “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art” (the radical feminist take on Warhol’s take on Duchamp). Beauty — that great taboo of the last hundred years — also need not be categorically rejected in a turn towards the political; as Gertrude Stein once put it, “If every one were not so indolent they would realize that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.”2 Such a relativizing position might grate on some, but I find it preferable to bull-headed polemics that inevitably prove inadequate to describe (much less judge) a world of art too vast and diverse to be brought to heel by any one person’s pre- or proscriptions.

That doesn’t mean we don’t each have our tastes and our hang-ups, and one of mine is anxiety about appearing frivolous or fluffy. Writing on a day when Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history and we might have a ceasefire with Iran and secret memos have revealed that the White House was thinking about suspending habeas corpus so they could deport people even faster… I do feel some kind of way about asking you to look closely with me at pink-ish paintings of trees and skies and astronomical phenomena. In the end, though, I was surprised by what they prodded me to think about: a post-human world of stunning sunsets and eclipses that couldn’t be farther from the bleak apocalyptic future Hollywood has envisioned for the planet. Whether the post-human is actually articulated in the paintings or is simply a matter of projection on my part, I’m not sure, but the work took me somewhere, and I appreciate anything that can transport me, even for a minute, out of our current hellscape.

Come along!

Angela Lane: Phase Shift, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

One of the first works you see upon entering Angela Lane’s solo exhibition “Phase Shift” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, is the oil painting Burning Sky, 2025, which depicts exactly what its title says: a salmon-tinged sky with a wisp of fire at its center, hovering above a pastoral landscape barren save for a few lines of trees. It’s unclear whether the flame is rising slowly, as if from an unseen candle, or descending with velocity: it’s discrete and seemingly contained, with a vaguely vaginal teardrop shape that suggests a portal opening up into the heavens or, more ominously, a meteor about to crash into the earth. The landscape, with its delicately painted windswept plains, appears unbothered.

Despite the grandeur of its subject, Burning Sky is petite: it’s one of eighteen oil paintings on birch plywood, all made in 2025 and 2026, most of them roughly the size of a large postcard or a trade paperback, with a few larger works closer to the scale of a magazine or an exhibition catalogue.

The size of the paintings and the tightness of Lane’s brushstrokes forces you in very close; in a museum with a guard nearby, I’m certain I’d have been yelled at for having my nose less than an inch from the surface of the work, marveling at scumbled lines coalescing into foliage. Part of what makes these paintings beguiling is the push-and-pull between the intimacy of the viewing experience and the distance implied by what the paintings represent when you take them in again as pictures. There’s pleasure in close viewing and uncertainty in contemplating the familiar-yet-strange meteorological (cosmological? mystical? divine?) events that mark each painting: beams, flashes, and arcs of light; double suns and moons; auras; and eclipses of various totalities.

The landscapes in each work feel anodyne by comparison, but they’re unsettling too: devoid of humans and human-made structures, they’re both empty and eerily anonymous. I was surprised to learn that Lane is English and lives in New Zealand, both places strongly associated with their verdant landscapes, neither of which appear to have strongly influenced the ones in these paintings. These imaginings come closer to sci-fi and fantasy, on the one hand, and to fantasies of lush, virgin landscapes from the history of art on the other.

Lane was included in a recent group show at the London gallery Cob, for which the press release noted, “Her unpeopled scenes are not empty: we are not depicted because we are the witnesses.” I want to suggest that these are instead premonitions, visions of a world to come, when civilization as we know it falls and nature returns, unfettered by notions of “progress” that, as we have seen, come at a terrible price. I’m reminded of dolphins returning to the Venice canals during Covid, when the various forms of capitalist enterprise driven by relentless tourism were forced to shut down. What would nature allow if humans were out of the picture entirely?

Lane’s paintings, which admittedly struck me at first as apolitical and escapist, in fact radiate with the anxieties of our age. (I mean, duh — that’s often precisely what escapism is about.) She is self-consciously part of a long history of artists using skyscapes and landscapes to represent and exorcize social anxieties; her Instagram (@subterraneanthunder) alternates images of her own paintings with work by some of her historical precedents, many of whom depicted meteorological phenomena in the early years of modernity, no doubt a time of great uncertainty and fear. Lane’s work looks backward — at a history of art and science rife with images of phenomena real and imagined — and forward, I think, to a future we won’t be here to see.

So what comes after this, after us? If Lane’s paintings are harbingers of the post-anthropocene (or maybe the post-post-anthropocene, depending on what other epoch of decline awaits), then what comes after looks rather serene, sky-bending beams of light notwithstanding. Perhaps whoever, or whatever, arrives to populate this place will treat it with greater awe and respect than we have.

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Thank you for reading! If you’re in Los Angeles, I highly recommend seeing these paintings at Anat Ebgi for yourself. They’re even more luminous in person. The exhibition remains on view through July 18, 2026.

Commissioned writing, independent opinion, powered by Artlance.

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Although this issue, as you’ll see, includes some food-art, the scope of Weekly Special is broadening to include non-gastronomic art subjects, though food will inevitably still come to the fore because — as I’ve been saying — it’s culturally important and ubiquitous and often a source of great amusement and pleasure.

WS will return to the weekly-ish cadence for which it is named, though it might take some time to get back into that rhythm. Thank you in advance for your patience and good will, and if you have tips or pitches, send them my way simply by replying to this email.

Without further ado, let’s dig in!

A Buffet of Food-Art and Art-Art

Farewell to David Hockney, Artist and Dachshund Lover

David Hockney, who died on June 11 at the age of 88, was perhaps best known for his paintings of pools in southern California. But I will always have the softest spot for his portraits of Stanley and Boodgie, a pair of dachshunds who were always by his side, particularly during a period marked by the deaths of several close friends. The pups are an LA story, too, set in Malibu between 1993 and 1995. “They are intelligent, loving, comical, and often bored,” Hockney wrote of the duo in the 1998 book Dog Days. “They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. And, being Hollywood dogs, they somehow seem to know that a picture is being made.”

Stephanie Shih x LACMA

There was a lot of fanfare (and eye-rolling) around LACMA’s announcement that the inaugural cafe in their new Geffen building would be operated by Erewhon, the overpriced and overhyped LA market known for $20+ Hailey Bieber smoothies. But the more exciting collabs were to be found inside the galleries, where LACMA had commissioned a slate of LA-based artists to make work riffing on aspects of the permanent collection. One of my favorites, unsurprisingly, was this extraordinarily vibrant still-life photograph by Stephanie Shih, who arranged flowers, fruit, and chamoy-lacquered gummies in and around a blue-and-white vase from the museum’s collection. “The story of chamoy,” Shih told the LA Times, “really parallels this journey of blue-and-white ceramics, which got to Mexico because of Spanish colonialism and then was adopted by local artisans. They really made it their own in the Talavera tradition. Chamoy similarly comes from Asia through pickled plums, particularly China via the Philippines. Filipino laborers came to Mexico via colonialism, and adapted and adopted champoy with spices and chilies from Mexico to become chamoy.” I’d never had chamoy before moving to LA some 17 years ago and can now confidently say that the meaning of life is likely found in a bag of spicy chamoy peach rings that you eat in one sitting and regret almost immediately.

“We Gotta Get Back to Our Roots” (Duchamp’s Urinal Edition)

The same day I listened to a somewhat confounding conversation between U.S. House of Representatives candidate Jack Schlossberg (grandson of JFK) and the New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which Schlossberg argued that content creation and co-presenting the Kennedy Profile in Courage Award with his mom counted as relevant work experience, I watched an equally confounding and supremely entertaining video in which this Congressional hopeful attempts to narrate the importance of Marcel Duchamp from inside his MoMA retrospective. (I have hot takes on the show for another time.) Given our current political landscape, it’s really saying something that this particular stint was memorably unhinged yet probably not disqualifying. I would love for our politicians to care about modern art (remember when Obama had to issue an apology to art historians?!)… but can a girl get more facts and less cringe, please?

Artificial Intelligence You Can Taste!

Dataland, a for-profit AI art venture founded by Refik Anadol and his wife and business partner Efsun Erkiliç, opens this Saturday in downtown LA, right across from Disney Concert Hall. I haven’t visited yet, but I’ve been bemused by the initial press trickling out, focused primarily on Dataland’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, created by “a foundational AI trained on one of the most extensive permission-based datasets of the natural world.” (No mention of environmental impact, though.) Matt Stromberg recounted his experience for Hyperallergic: “The scent of a damp forest floor wafted through the air, dispersed by a device I wore around my neck. The walls seemed to shift around me, and my heart began racing. It was exhilarating. It was mesmerizing. I felt like I was going to be sick.” Sounds promising. I fixated instead on the part about snacks: for an extra $8 on top of a standard $49 ticket, you can enjoy a few bonbons, made by local chocolatier Valerie, with “flavor profiles tuned by AI,” whatever that means. I’m curious, but not $57-plus-the-horror-of-downtown-parking curious. If I get press access, though, I’ll report back. I have no doubt that AI will usher in the end of civilization, but hey, at least we'll get some tasty treats along the way!

That’s it for this week’s special! Join me next week for more on the apocalypse, with a review of an exhibition of paintings by New Zealand-based artist Angela Lane. No AI chocolate, alas, but there’ll be some killer eclipses!

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I wish I had some bouncy content to share this week, but I’d rather use this little platform to boost fundraising efforts specifically for artists. Although national news has tended to focus more on the destruction of celebrity homes in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, a very robust artist community in Altadena and Pasadena — beautiful communities on the far east side of the city — have also experienced unthinkable destruction. Thousands of homes and studios are gone. Schools and houses of worship and beloved restaurants have burned to the ground. More than one artist has lost all of the work intended for imminent exhibitions. Others were spared the worst, but can’t go back until significant cleanup occurs.

If you follow contemporary art, you will know at least one of the names of the artists who have lost their homes, which include (according to the Vanity Fair piece linked below): Alec Egan, Ross Simonini, Kathryn Andrews, Analia Saban, Kelly Akashi, Daniel Mendel-Black, Kate Mosher Hall, Amir Nikravan, Christina Quarles, John Knuth, Salomón Huerta, Adam Ross, Beatriz Cortez, Asher Hartman, Alice Könitz (whose property also housed artist Beatriz Cortez), Molly Tierney, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Mark Whalen, Jean Robison, Rebecca Baron, Rachelle Sawatsky, Grayson Revoir, Camilla Taylor, Tara Walters, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, and Andy Ouchi, as well as married couples Diana Thater and T. Kelly Mason and Jill Spector and Bret Nicely. Paul McCarthy lost his home as well, as did both of his adult children. Curator Mika Yoshitake’s home is gone, as is the incredibly beautiful, art-filled family home of my former boss and dear friend Paul Schimmel.

You can read more in-depth reporting on the impact of the fires on artists here:

• How the Los Angeles Fires Have Affected the Art World (Vanity Fair)

• “It Looks Like a Bomb Exploded”: LA Artists Grapple With Loss as Fires Rage (Hyperallergic)

• Los Angeles Artists Mourn as Their Studios and Artworks Go Up in Smoke (New York Times)

No matter where you are, here’s what you can do to help:

• Donate to one or more of many, many GoFundMe pages

• Give to LA Art World Fire Relief, which is being organized by artists and art workers

• Have art supplies to send? Contact Adam Alessi at artistreliefLA@gmail.com

This horrific event — which is still not over — will affect the amazing art community in LA for a very long time. I will continue posting fundraising and relief efforts as the best avenues for help become more evident in the coming weeks.

More food-art content soon, I hope.

Stay safe.

Hello and happy… December?! It’s been over a year since I published an issue of Weekly Special, thanks to some very big (very worthy) projects that consumed all of my free time and brain space. I’m about to embark on a bunch of other Major Things, but in this moment of pause, I wanted nothing more than to revisit Weekly Special, which is like an old friend who lives far away and seldom visits but as soon as you’re together, it’s like no time has passed at all. Or your favorite Trader Joe’s seasonal treats, which reliably return each winter and make everything better.

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A Buffet of Food-Art Stories

Beuys Beuys Beuys at the Broad

Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature is one of the projects that took me away from pleasure-writing over the last year, so it feels only right to share it with you. Bringing together more than 400 editioned objects (called “multiples”) by the late German artist, this exhibition at the Broad museum in downtown LA, co-curated with Sarah Loyer, is simply chock full of food art. Beuys—who was the subject of my dissertation—famously made sculptures with various forms of fat (butter, tallow, margarine), investing his work with energy and entropy, and chaos and frustration for all future museum stewards of the work. He also incorporated food into dozens of his multiples, all on view at the Broad; my favorites include fat-smeared stationery, a bag of dried peas and a tub of margarine from the DDR (pictured above), a giant cistern of olive oil (also memorialized in a video modeled after Warhol’s screen tests), a bottle of Maggi seasoning paired with a volume by Kant, and a fried fish skeleton hanging in a wooden box, which I discussed at length in this issue of Weekly Special from 2021.

The show’s on view through March 23. Come check it out if you’re in LA, and if you’re not, you can still get your Beuys fix with our gorgeous two-sided exhibition catalogue, sold at the Broad, through the publisher, on Amazon, and probably at an art bookstore near you.

Helen Rosner’s A+ Holiday Gift Guide

I bought most of my holiday gifts over the Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday clusterf⋆ck of weekend sales, but if you’re still looking for gifts for a special someone who loves food or food-themed stuff, look no further than Helen Rosner’s 2024 holiday gift guide. Banana boots? Pickle-flavored toothpaste? A lobster barrette? Egg cups made of bread? Sign. Me. Up. (If you’re in a giving mood, please send me these baked potato bowls, which remind me of Claes Oldenburg’s soft-sculpted spuds.)

The Banana Everyone Loves to Hate

I was shocked that my husband wasn’t up on all of the twists and turns of the latest art world controversy, which happens to be about an overpriced banana, until I realized my IG feed is an art world bubble that does not correspond with reality. So here’s the 411 (do people still say that?) for the similarly uninformed: Back in 2019, conceptual (con) artist Maurizio Cattelan (and his gallery, Perrotin) exhibited an artwork at Art Basel Miami that consisted of a bodega banana affixed to the wall with duct tape. Titled Comedian, the banana—the actual fruit but also the right to re-stage the work—commanded a price of $120,000, which set off a shitstorm of think pieces and hot-take commentary that was, unquestionably, the point of the work. (One of my favorite articles invoked the Lucile Bluth bit about not knowing the price of a banana, which I love as a Comedian origin story.) Fast forward five years, here we are on the brink of the End Times, and the banana is in the news again because the second work in the original edition of three was on the auction block at Sotheby’s in New York. A cryptobro named Justin Sun bought it for a whopping $6.2m and then, because why not, ate it for a photo-op.

Cue dozens more think pieces, none worth linking here, that, yet again, deliver Cattelan and the market the spectacle they want. I have no hot takes myself: I’m fine with this being art, even somewhat interesting art for what it says about the completely delulu relationship with value that capital hath wrought. I wish rich people would find less icky ways to spend their money, but I feel that way all the time, and the banana stunt is just slightly dumber than say, Rolexes and Rolls Royces. Anyway, I’m only deigning to draw more attention to the banana fiasco because I do want to highlight the one story worth reading—Sarah Maslin Nir’s profile of the down-and-out fruit vendor who sold Sotheby’s the banana used for the auction. Her reporting makes the disparities inherent to the story stark and real, sketching an appalling contrast between the 74-year-old vendor, Shah Alam, who lives in a basement, barely able to provide for himself, and a mega-wealthy collector who can light millions on fire for what amounts to a joke.

To wrap it all up in a nice, neat late capitalist bow, Sun (who incidentally just made the Trumps $15m richer) offered to buy 100,000 bananas from Alam, while someone else with much less money and much greater empathy set up a GoFundMe for Alam, which closed shortly after exceeding $19,000, far more than its modest $5k goal.

More Non-Banana News

Meaty Gifts: Lauren Cohen, whose hot dog sculptures I first encountered at Frieze LA this past February, is yet again putting on a holiday exhibition that promises to be delightful. Last year she created a Holiday Charcuterie Booth; this year she’s staged Lauren’s Xmas Shop at ArtX NYC, on view from December 5 to 22, with ceramic treats that include a menorah of meat skewers, wavy bacon, creepy wedges of Brie, and the cutest little cornichons. Please go and report back!

Scavenged Cocktail Bars: I love that food-artist Dieter Roth’s son and grandsons have carried on the tradition of collecting, storing, and assembling thousands of pounds of found objects to create various iterations of the Roth Bar, an installation concept the elder Roth began incorporating into his exhibitions in the late 70s. This feature in Hauser & Wirth’s magazine documents some of their best finds.

Carl Cheng’s Avocado Pits: Carl Cheng, a conceptual artist based in Santa Monica, is the subject of a major exhibition that just closed at The Contemporary Austin and will open in a few weeks at the ICA Philadelphia. Among many other works is Nature Laboratory 3.0 (1970-2022), a greenhouse filled with shelf after shelf of carved and sculpted avocado skins that look like precious artifacts discovered on an archeological dig. I can’t wait to see this show when it comes to LA — the most appropriate home for an altar to avocados — at the conclusion of its world tour.

Beet Juice Abstraction: Enjoy this video of Hayv Kahraman talking about her use of torshi, a fermented vegetable condiment, in her solo show at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The work is an homage to her late mother and, by her own reckoning, a collaboration with the lactic acid bacteria that break down turnips, beets, and other veggies to make what functions, in Kahraman’s hands, as an intensely colored painting medium.

Coming Soon: Speaking of art made with foodstuffs… I’m super excited for this upcoming exhibition at the Hammer, which promises prints and drawings made with “blood, smoke, Kool-Aid, coffee, scrap metal, vegetable juice, pins, dryer lint, and more.” On view starting December 21!

Thank you for reading! If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Now that we’re at peak summer, it feels right to drop the next post in my series on food-artist extraordinaire, Claes Oldenburg. This time it’s all about THE BURGER. (You can find the first post, on his baked potatoes, here.)

Oldenburg’s Floor Burger is an icon. If you don’t know it already, you’ll be in love with it by the time you finish reading. And if you do know it, I think you’ll find at least one tidbit below that’ll make you love it even more. (Seriously, read to the end.)

Before we get to the burger content, you’ll find some quick links to food-art news that I’ve shared recently on Instagram — which is also a reminder to follow Weekly Special on the ‘gram for more frequent delights, such as ceramic donuts, IKEA bagel lamp hacks, and shrimp mesh bras, delivered to your Stories feed daily.

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The Variety Pack: Food-art news from around the globe

🥩 David Horvitz is making prints with Spam 🍞 Karon Davis released an open edition of multiples paying homage to the Black Panthers’ free lunch program 💦 Evan Kleiman interviewed LA’s famed water sommelier, who designed the water menu (RIP) at LACMA’s Ray and Stark Bar 🍎 Nic Dyer released a summer-ready print edition 🥒 Anastasia Inciardi installed a mini food print vending machine in Maine 🥬 Hyperallergic tells the story of a failed vegetable garden at Tehran’s contemporary art museum

🤩 Food-art exhibitions on view now: Feast, Standard Space, Sharon, CT ✦ Gathering, FiveMyles, Crown Heights ✦ Slavs and Tatars, Tanya Bonakdar, LA (and recently at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeitler, Berlin) ✦ Daniel Giordano, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA ✦ Food in New York, The Museum of the City of New York, NYC ✦ Michael Rakowitz, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK 😥 Just closed: Stephanie Temma Hier, Nino Mier, Brussels ✶ Sherrill Roland, Tanya Bonakdar, LA ✶ Lucia Hierro, Charlie James, LA ✦ Ben Sanders, Marta, LA ✦ Luisa Mera, Bill Brady, LA

This Week’s Special: A Tribute to Claes Oldenburg, One of the Greatest Food-Artists of All Time, Part 2 of Several

All works below are by Claes Oldenburg unless otherwise noted.

THE BURGER

Floor Burger — a 700-pound soft sculpture of a burger topped with a sliced pickle — is one of Claes Oldenburg’s most iconic works. Initially called Giant Hamburger, it debuted at his first uptown New York show in the fall of 1962, at the legendary Green Gallery run by dealer Richard Bellamy.

Like the baked potatoes chronicled here last year, the burger and its floor-bound mates Floor Cake and Floor Cone were all about bringing sculpture low, quite literally, while simultaneously elevating the stuff of everyday life. One of my favorite pieces of writing ever, in any genre, is Oldenburg’s 1961 manifesto “I Am For…,” where he argues fervently for the sublimity of the ordinary. At the end of a document pulsing with the heartbeat of Pop, he writes: “I am for US Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-Eat art, Best-for-Less art, Ready-to-Cook art, Fully Cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art…”

A-fucking-men, Claes.

Reminiscing years later on the impact of his sole visit to the Green Gallery, sculptor Richard Serra (best known for his monumental works of curved steel) recalled his encounter with Oldenburg’s burger. “I thought it was unusual and the scale was absurd,” he said. “I thought it was coming out of a tradition that didn’t have anything to do with Dali’s soft watch, yet it was three dimensional and it was displaying spaces of volume and thumbing its nose at traditional sculpture. It was good as art and empowering because it gave you permission in a good way. I never thought that anybody, up until Oldenburg, used gravity as a force to build anything with.”1

The burger was sewn on a little Singer sewing machine that Oldenburg’s wife, Patty Mucha, had bought in order to make her own clothes. (The machine was also once stolen and recovered, a story Mucha tells in her 2015 oral history.) This wasn’t the first time the two had worked together professionally. Oldenburg and Mucha had performed together in Happenings staged at Oldenburg’s Store a year earlier, but on the question of whether they were true collaborators, Mucha was conflicted:

I was a slave. No. I was not. I’m always happy. All these young art historians tell me I’m a collaborator. Crazy. I was a fucking slave. I’m physical. I’m a doer. Everything you see here, I’ve done. Painted the walls. I do things, so I did things there too. We had to strip the place between every week, the change. I’d help make the props. I’d paint on the walls. I’d do everything. I’d stuff—he’d keep saying, “Poopy, stop reading stuff,” because we’d stuff with newspapers and I’d be reading.

No. I think if it’s a collaboration, maybe now it’s called a collaboration. But then, I didn’t feel like it was a collaboration. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d thought it was at that point in my life. I don’t know. I loved him so much so it didn’t matter. We were having a good time. It was so much fun. He was so cute. I mean, he was so intelligent. He was so much fun. He had a good sense of humor. At that time he did; I think he still does.2

Mucha wasn’t the only neglected “woman behind the man” in the evolution of Oldenburg’s work. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has since become an international superstar, alleged that Oldenburg stole the idea of soft sculpture from her, having seen her breakthrough work Accumulation No. 1, a phallus-covered armchair, in a Green Gallery exhibition in early 1962 — a show that also included a papier-mâché suit jacket by Oldenburg.3

Thankfully Kusama has since gotten her due (and then some), but it was deeply painful for her at the time to see yet another white male artist receive greater fanfare for an innovation that wasn’t entirely his own — and one that developed a different psychological charge in the hands of a male sculptor, whose turn away from the traditional hardness and masculinity of sculpture would be seen, perhaps, as more radical than the gesture Kusama was making.

“I always say I’m not doing a hamburger, I’m doing a sculpture.”

The burger’s next chapter was equally fraught. In 1967, five years after the burger’s New York debut, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto announced plans to acquire the work for its permanent collection, reportedly for $2,000 CAD — about $13,000 USD today, which is a TOTAL steal.4 (That amount would mayyybeee buy you a modest Oldenburg drawing now, nothing approaching a big-ass soft sculpture.)

Taxpayers — at least a very vocal handful of them — were not pleased. Even though the museum took pains to inform the public that zero tax dollars were being used to buy the burger, naysayers, including a group of high school students, protested the purchase and the debased frivolity it represented. Though they intended it to be mocking, their giant ketchup bottle is the perfect Oldenburg homage:

But nobody can stay mad at a giant burger forever. The acquisition went through (kudos to AGO leadership of the time for staying the course!) and after the initial fanfare subsided, Floor Burger became a beloved fixture of the museum. If you want to feel the affection for yourself, read this chronicle of the burger’s 2013 conservation treatment, which readied the sculpture to return to New York for the first time in 50 years.

I have more to say about the burger, but if you’ve made it this far with me, thank you and please enjoy this spicy parting treat:

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to hit that heart icon — or, better yet, forward it to a friend who needs more meat joy in their lives. Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Happy Monday! Take a break from work emails (they’ll be there when you finish, I promise) and spend a few minutes with some of the best sculptural work being made today, by a fabulously talented artist who really lives out his aesthetic commitments.

When I met Daniel Giordano for the first time last July, I wrote this about our encounter:

Over the course of a few hours together, I learned that Daniel (with whom I’d only ever chatted over IG) has a magnetic intensity and excitability that mirrors the effusiveness of his approach to sculpture. His vibe is a bit zany scientist, which rhymes perfectly with the fact that he works out of his grandfather’s former garment factory, situated along the Hudson River in upstate New York. His work has the feel of wacky, nuclear detritus — it’s somehow both alive and already artifact, made of tons of things you can’t identify, glommed together into an alien form that would be right at home in the wake of apocalypse. Though more is more for Daniel, it’s also just enough: the end result isn’t an unwieldy, messy blob of stuff, it’s a relatively economical, controlled form that pulses with the energies of everything in and on it, much of which relates to Daniel’s own personal history.

I promised then to return to Daniel’s work, which is simply too rich to excavate in one little write-up, and here we are! I’m thrilled to bring you this interview on the occasion of his major solo show, curated by my lovely colleague Susan Cross, now on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. I’m so grateful to Daniel, who very generously responded to all of my questions with care and thoughtfulness (and a lot of humor), and sent me spectacular behind-the-scenes photos of his studio to share with you. He’s an A++ human being and artist, and this won’t be the last you see of him in Weekly Special.

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Maximalist Gnarliness: An Interview with Artist Daniel Giordano

This interview was conducted via email in May and June 2023. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Huge congratulations on your solo show at MASS MoCA, Love from Vicki Island! First things first: Where or what is Vicki Island, and can I go there?

Vicki Island is my atelier located in the Hudson Highlands of Orange County, NY, in the city of Newburgh, situated on one of the main arteries of my small city, Liberty Street.

Vicki Island is open by appointment for a personal tour. It is a three-story factory complex that is named after my Aunt Vicki. The Vicki Clothing Company, which my grandfather Francesco started in the 1940s, manufactured women’s long coats for about five decades. It was my playground growing up and continues to be so. Vicki Island is my sanctuary and is a place unlike any other.

The enterprise operated successfully for years, switching hands to my father Tony in the 1970s. The top floor was the cutting room where the fabric was cut from patterns, on the second floor the coats were assembled and stitched by the seamstresses, and the bottom floor was where the pressing and finishing was done before the coats were shipped out. Many of the employees were Italian immigrants and served as my connection to the old country and its culture; some I considered surrogate relatives. The business carried on until it could not compete with offshore manufacturing and my father had no choice but to lay off all 80 of its workers in the mid 1990s.

I have fond childhood memories of being sandwiched between a large pile of coats and the roof of my father’s Bronco for deliveries to the garment district in New York City. After the handoff, we would celebrate with a huge meal at Carmine’s and then pastries from Veniero’s.

Once the factory closed, my father started a marine canvas and upholstery business, bending balletic metal arcs that were outfitted with custom canvas stretched to form perfect awnings for the motorboats on the Hudson River. Advanced Custom Canvas was regarded highly and ran until the 2008 recession.

Since 2013, I have taken full advantage of the factory’s idleness and the inspiration it holds. The third floor is a time capsule and storage unit for all the industry left behind, including sewing machines, press machines, parts, equipment, tools, bolts of wool, vinyl, marine canvas, and plenty of dust.

I frolic about the factory, reciting my many mantras to myself:

“Vicki is my faith and I must stay loyally devoted to her. I am determined to keep Vicki alive. Vicki's work is never done. Do I have it in me to be Vicki? What would Vicki do? Vicki is a state of mind. Vicki is a way of life. Hands to work, hearts to Vicki.”

Vicki herself was an entrepreneur. She ran Vicki's Video Villa (a video cassette tape rental service), then Vicki's Kool Delights (an ice cream parlor), and managed a little league baseball team one season, the only female in the league and led the team to WIN the championship. Vicki and I bond and catch up over a meal of pasta about once a month. She has a strong personality and sports a beehive hairdo. She speaks her mind and used to wear three-inch nails.

I love how multilayered Vicki Island is, as a space with a deep history that’s personal to you and that resonates with the experiences of many other family-owned businesses over the last few decades. I also love that the detritus of industry is so central to your sculptures — it puts me in mind of other artists who had transformative experiences in defunct factories, from Agnes Martin to Eva Hesse. (This legacy also makes it so perfect for your work to be on view at MASS MoCA, which of course shares that history.) Your materials also usually exceed what one might find in a factory space — especially when you work with ephemeral substances, including food. What are some of the wildest things that found their way into the sculptures in Love from Vicki Island?

According to William Corwin, artist and writer, my material lists in Love from Vicki Island “run on like the witches' brew in Macbeth”: urinal cakes, dog ticks, hexactinellid, terrone, alligator claws, prosciutto, charred tennis ball felt, pomade, spring peeper frogs, paintings by Peter Eide (a dear friend), Tang drink mix, turkey vulture talons, vitamin D capsules, bald eagle excrement, Choo Choo’s fur (a Golden Retriever), goat skin cock rings, sparklers, lucky rabbits’ feet, panettone, Maraschino cherries, electroplated 24-karat gold paper plates, Vicki Island’s garment factory dust, pizzelles, stock fish, Dior lipstick, my aunt Vicki’s cheesecake, and so much more!

One thing you didn’t mention in that incredible list is the deep-fried motocross bikes that feature in the sculpture My Scorpio I. Can you walk us through the process of deep-frying massive non-food objects?

I amuse myself by defuncting and defiling machines and tools, so as to render them useless. Sports vehicles serve as the main component in the My Scorpio typology. These vehicles are commonly seen speeding through the Hudson Valley landscape. To deep-fry an object, I begin by applying a homemade slurry onto its surface. I submerge the parts that will fit into a vat of boiling oil, and for sections that are too large, I baste the oil over the surface with a greasy ladle and thoroughly crisp the concoction with a blowtorch for good measure. I’ve also deep-fried ceramic, boulders, a high-heeled shoe, a baseball bat, cattails, an eel, a kudu horn, and aluminum components among other things. Once the piece is fried to my content, I drench it with layers of shellac and/or epoxy resin, immortalizing it. My father has helped me achieve this on many occasions.

Deep frying random foodstuffs puts me in mind of county fairs, where deep-frying is like a competitive sport. Does fried food have that association for you, too? And dare I ask for your recipe?

I learned from a few important women the process of deep-frying objects with slightly varying recipes. My mom, Roseanne; my late surrogate grandmother, Adelaide Tallerico (who was the head of quality control at the Vicki Clothing Company); and my friend’s mother, Miki Paez, all lent their expertise. In order to deep-fry something, whip eggs into a homogeneous slurry, season it with basil, oregano, rosemary, marjoram and thyme. Ladle it onto the desired surface and sprinkle bread crumbs on top. Heat the frying oil to a boil and submerge the slathered area until cooked to a golden appearance.

Many of my favorite dishes that intrigued me as a child were deep-fried, such as eggplant parmesan, chicken parmesan, and fried calamari. I would play with the squid tentacles and found the idea of eating them repulsive yet delightful, having the option to bathe my dinnertime pets in marinara sauce. These dishes are attached to distinct memories I gathered while dining at the Capri, an Italian restaurant my family would frequent on Broadway in Newburgh. My parents were friends with the owners and the staff, many of whom had relatives that worked at the Vicki Clothing Company.

I recall going to New York City’s San Gennaro celebration in Little Italy and mom getting my brother and me zeppole (balls of fried dough), still glistening from the fryer and freshly dusted with powdered sugar. The unwavering tradition, faith, and joy was evident in those crowded streets. My brother and I also enjoyed eating fried dough during our annual trip to the Dutchess County fair in Rhinebeck, NY.

In Ren and Stimpy — an off-color children’s show that played on Nickelodeon in the early 1990s — one of my favorite episodes featured Billy the Beef Tallow Boy, who deep-fried objects ranging from a landline telephone to a shiny purple Buick. Billy taught me I could deep-fry anything.

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Ren and Stimpy! Such a bizarre, foundational part of my own childhood too. We could certainly talk more about Billy the Beef Tallow Boy… but I want to drill deeper into all of the traditional Italian products that make frequent appearances in your work. In Love from Vicki Island, I noted zucchini flowers, Amarelli liquorice, stockfish, mascarpone, and (the obviously inedible) Murano glass. Clearly the Italianness of these materials relates to your own heritage, but do they have more specific associations for you? And do they have a different charge for you now that they also appear in your sculptures?

My works serve as reliquaries, tributes, and humble monuments to the things I know, have internalized, and are part of me, be it experientially or by ingesting it. Relatives on both sides of my family originate from the Veneto region of Italy, so I seek out traditional Italian confections and cultural artifacts to incorporate into my sculptures. I was given a large box of Murano glass shards by my friend Miki Paez, who specializes in selling antique Venetian glass. These colorful shards reference the small island of Murano, world-renowned for glass craftsmanship, and my ancestors lived nearby.

Years ago, Adelaide’s husband worked at a local bakery, so my family was frequently given day-old Italian confections. Cannolis, black and white cookies, and baggies of colorful Easter cookies were often available. Adelaide would also make her own sausages, using the animal intestines to encase the meat.

When visiting my dear grandmother Nonni’s house in the summertime, my father would pluck tomatoes from her garden and process them into sauce in the driveway. Her basement was lined with rows and rows of canned sauce and preserved vegetables. My father also used to make his own wine, like his father. I incorporate old spigots and materials from the wine-making process that I find stored on Vicki Island. Food plays such a large role in Italian culture, and my upbringing was shaped by uniquely Italian-American flavors and traditions. My method of incorporating food in my sculptures is my way of preserving these childhood memories, serving as homage to my loved ones and celebrating my Italian-American heritage.

Nowadays, I no longer consider these items to be food from a nutritional point of view. I adhere to a strict whole food plant-based diet with no added sugar, oil, or salt. This enables me to function optimally and stave off western diseases. I consider the confections and meats that are associated with Italian culture to be raw material components that evoke distinct memories for me.

There’s something about turning foodstuffs into “raw material” that makes me think about the grotesque and the abject, two fairly significant tropes in the art of the last century. Do you consciously think about situating your work in that lineage, or are there other tropes, concepts, aesthetics that are more important to you?

My work embodies my Newburgh: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The economic bleakness. There is so much rich indigenous, colonial, revolutionary, architectural, and industrial history here. While walking the streets, I am often reminded of the brutal carnage and destruction of both people and the environment. I make my work in the wake of what the Hudson River Painters, America’s first authentic art movement, feared most: the growth of industry encroaching on the earth’s bounty. They stylistically erased evidence of the forthcoming industry from their idyllic depictions of the landscape so that it appeared still wild, untouched.

The Hudson River alone has been considered a Superfund site for the last four decades, yet the rolling mountains create such an awe-inspiring scenic backdrop to the toxic horrific realities. I aim to evoke what I refer to as the “fucked-up-itudes,” and to capture the realistic essence of the complex place I call home while also drawing from other influences.

I am fascinated by teratology, in both definitions of the word — abnormalities and oddities, as well as fantastical beasts. I also love the supernatural, demonic, and alien creatures from literature, theater, and films. Aesthetically, I revere Pumpkinhead, the 1988 cult classic folk horror movie. The creature’s moist irregular membrane flesh and the way light rakes across its body to showcase its nimble features has made an indelible mark. Its horrifically elongated torso and extremities made such an impression on me as a child, the monster haunted me for years.

When I opened one of the fiber drums that serve as a pedestal in Love From Vicki Island, I uncovered a treasure trove of my childhood Todd McFarland Spawn toys. Gundam Wing sets, Alien toys from the Alien movie franchise, and Star Wars toys — these detailed and otherworldly action figures have had a major influence on my artistic sensibilities.

My brother Anthony and I played with our GI Joe action figures until their limbs would break off and we had to hot glue them back together. After repeated applications, the joints would bulge with so much thermoplastic ooze that the figures took on a new form. Susan Cross, the senior curator at MASS MoCA who organized Love from Vicki Island, pointed out that these seams and imperfect joints still remain visible in my work today.

I like to incorporate flora and fauna that are indicative of the Hudson Valley region or objects I consider echt American, such as bald eagle excrement, bison tails, and Truck Nutz. I also use invasive species such as water caltrops, which are abundant along the Hudson River shoreline, and spotted lantern flies. I collect natural materials that I find on my travels and use old factory parts from Vicki Island such as spent thread spools, garment factory dust, fabric, and thread scraps. All these things are part of my experience in the Hudson Highlands.

America is a consumerist culture where we live in excess and perpetual waste — I often use refuse as main components in my work such as paper plates, moisturizing face masks, Hudson River industrial detritus, clunkers (groggy/warped/fused bricks from Newburgh’s brick manufacturing days), curious multi-colored epoxy spew, buoys, dock foam, my used contact lenses, and old Christmas ornaments.

I use what is available to me and assemble all of what I know and have internalized. It all culminates into a new singular entity as a portrait of a family member, loved one, my hometown, my region, our nation, and our world. In its maximalist gnarliness, it yields poetic beauty. I have always made work this way, since my earliest childhood drawings and sock puppets. It is intended to be playful, cheeky, a farce, but most importantly, a sincere and genuine celebration. I am making Art. My work embodies my whole life in magical iterations. I excavate meaning and source material from myself and what I know. There is an entire treasure trove of inherent knowledge within all of us, we simply have to excavate it to unleash the fury, full throttle.

I love the phrase “maximalist gnarliness,” which perfectly, succinctly describes the aesthetic impact of your sculptures. Can you share more about how you use epoxies, resins, and/or shellacs to "fix" or stabilize your work? Does that fixative step essentially guarantee that your ephemeral food-based materials won’t rot? Your work seems to suggest ephemerality and preservation at the same time — which is maybe one of the things about it that strikes me as grotesque.

I use archival resins and epoxies to immortalize food and other organic matter in an effort to plasticize, mummify, and preserve. The materials I select hold a deep meaning and emotional potency. I am putting my heart and soul into this work so I want it to last. I see my sculptures as reliquaries, encapsulating memories and experiences. I relate it to combing and braiding my mother’s hair as a child, or to her favorite band, The Beach Boys and their inimitable singing in unison which became known as the Beach Boy cantata. The disparate elements that come together to create the whole of my artworks sing in harmony to form a new entity as one, as the dollar reads: e pluribus unum.

In my preservation, everything is an experiment and I make it work. I add more stable material to fight the decomposition. Perhaps eventually it breaks down to nothing and then finally it will be complete!

Now that we’re talking about time, I noticed that a number of works in Love from Vicki Island have rather long dates of production, sometimes spanning two to three years. How do you think about duration in your process?

I feel it is important to illustrate the time it took to create the work. It indicates a span of my lifetime spent putting my efforts into each sculpture to make it the very best it can be. Another reason there are long swaths of time on many of the works is because I produce components en masse and stockpile them until I find the right application. I have multiple projects in differing stages of completion at any given time. The production line is nonlinear and each sculpture includes fabricated components from the past.

The timeframe of making my work is an anachronistic procedure. Some work comes together like a lighting bolt strike, where other works form like the wind chiseling stone. I like to think I imbue the work with a full spectrum of life and emotion, which often demands more time.

For many works, I am aware it needs something more but perhaps haven’t invented what I feel is the right surface treatment to slather on it yet, or found/fabricated a certain component that will make its presence ten times as lethal, so the work will have to be patient in order to evolve. I am channeling the industrious energy of Vicki Island but subverting the nature of its mass production by making these often slow, however plentiful, one-of-a-kind items. It is important for me to be prolific despite the time it takes to create the good stuff.

That is where the different typologies have formed. At the museum, you’ll see Pleasure Pipes, Self-Portraits, My Scorpio, Heel, My Bare-Nakeds, Study For Brothers, a Hot Toddy, and one My Immaculate Conception. They all have respective forms, themes, material combinations, and sizes. Each work demands the time it takes until I feel that I cannot do anything more. If it has a commanding presence, I deem it done.

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Before this conversation, I hadn’t realized how much you think of your work as unfolding in sets of typologies. With this major solo show under your belt, where are you pushing your practice now?

I am developing a new typology of work dubbed My Matmos, named after the evil bubbling goo in the movie Barbarella. These wallbound works function like reliefs, reminiscent of the sand casted works of Constantino Nivola. I am using long forgotten marine interior cushions from my father’s gutted and abandoned fishing boat as the foundation to depict imagery that stems from my drawings, with colorful rays emanating from skulls and buzzing macaronic flies. I am needle felting into the uniquely shaped cushions with wool roving and steel wool, building up the surface while also burning through the cushion cover and upholstery foam to create craters, while embedding objects such as a dried out and plasticized cow pie, a deer skull laminated with tennis ball felt, rusty bottle caps, and a pair of Truck Nutz dangling from the corner as the final adornment.

I pose the question, “how do I make the thing feel more real than it does in reality?” Make it more visceral and slow the viewers’ recognition of the familiar objects before them. My goal is to make sculptures that appear new to the eye, like naturally occurring phenomena that seem to have been dredged from the depths of the Hudson River. How can I bring these mundane and familiar materials out of the ordinary and into an otherworldly realm?

Thank you for reading!

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Happy May! The sun in LA is finally shining (most days, anyway) and the hills are alive with so. many. flowers. We haven’t driven out to see any of the much-publicized superbloom sites because we’ve been getting our flower fix much closer to home, driving through our neighborhood (where one house has been practically obliterated by bougainvillea) and on the way to work in Malibu — a commute that is marked by ocean to my left and cliffs studded with chartreuse, aureolin, and fuchsia to my right.

But there’s no such thing as beauty without some price being paid,1 even beyond the devastating rains that ushered in all of this growth. Sure enough, that eye-tickling acid yellow I see on my drive is Scotch broom, an invasive species that originated in Europe and North Africa. It’s now found up and down the West Coast, where it acidifies the soil, displaces native plant species and, because of the rate at which it burns, contributes to the speed and intensity of forest fires. Sigh.

This issue of Weekly Special, written by guest contributor Aaron Gonsher, tells a story about how color — and our socialized notions of beauty and health — not only mask environmental harm but very directly contribute to it. The subject of Aaron’s essay is a project called Salmon: A Red Herring, by UK-based artist duo Cooking Sections, which articulates the crucial role aesthetics plays in our consumption habits. Fair warning: if you haven’t yet been put off farmed salmon by extensive reporting about unsustainable practices and rampant sea lice, you might be renouncing the artificially pink stuff by the end of this issue.

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Let’s… dig in?

Deconstructing [Salmon]

by Aaron Gonsher

After finishing Salmon: A Red Herring, I made an ill-advised decision to visit the fishmonger at my local market. The person behind the counter didn't understand why I wanted to take photos, but my interest was aesthetic, not culinary. I'd spent the last few days reading the depressing, entertaining book by the Cooking Sections artist duo Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, and the filets on display had, at least temporarily, ceased to appear as anything appetizing. The glistening fish on ice looked like what I'd been retrained to see: precision-engineered Pantone swatches. They were in ranges I previously thought I had the vocabulary to describe — pink, orangish, "salmon" — but which now communicated quantifiable color above all else: 1555U, 1565U, 487U, 1635U, 1575U, 157U, 486U, 1645U, 1665U, 485U, 2347U.  

Those are the 11 Pantone numbers that comprise what Cooking Sections calls “[salmon]," according to the SalmoFan™, a classification and reference system invented by Hoffman-La Roche to guide the amount of synthetic color in the feed of farmed salmon required to achieve a specific hue. The average employee of an aquaculture farm has tools at their disposal to match any painter’s palette, though these hues are based on economics and not expression. Darker "[salmon]" is generally more expensive and has more astaxanthin in its feed, which dyes the flesh. Lighter farmed salmon has less astaxanthin, and is perceived to be cheaper and lower quality, though there are varied geographic preferences. Wild salmon get their color through a diet of crustaceans rich in natural astaxanthin, such as shrimp and krill, and absorb fat-soluble pigments called carotenoids. But farmed salmon isn't authentically pink – it's gray. According to Cooking Sections, these fish are not "salmon" in the natural sense we assume, but "[salmon]," a far more slippery and industrialized identifier.

Salmon: A Red Herring is both a book, published in 2020 by isolarii, and an installation of the same name at Tate Britain, on view from November 2020 through August 2021. In the lead up to the project, the London-based Pascual and Schwabe, who describe themselves as “spatial practitioners,” spent time in deep research on the destructive culture of [salmon] farming on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The site serves as a harvest and transport hub for worldwide trade of the fish and has a population ratio of approximately 1,600 fish for every person. Their collaboration with the Tate resulted in more than just an exhibition: it led to all of the museum’s restaurants and cafes removing farmed salmon from their menus in favor of "a CLIMAVORE dish – in perpetuity."2 

Salmon is part of Cooking Sections’ ongoing CLIMAVORE project, which starts from the question, "how does what we eat as humans change climates?" Initiated in 2015, CLIMAVORE has developed additional works including Mussel Beach, which "navigate[d] the past, present, and future of Muscle Beach, California, by looking at mussels”; Wallowland, which was commissioned for the 17th Istanbul Art Biennial and featured a pudding shop, field recordings, and a celebration centering water buffalo and their herders; and To Those Who Nourish, an ongoing project to rehabilitate Lake Erie, commissioned for the 2nd FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in 2022 and overseen by Cleveland arts organization SPACES.

“Climavore” is an apt term for the current moment, as eaters grapple with dietary choices within a destructive global food system. It follows in the footsteps of “climatarian,” defined as “a person who chooses what to eat according to what is least harmful to the environment,” which entered the Cambridge Dictionary in 2016. These are two of many approaches that take sustainability as a starting point; see also: locavore, reducetarian, and regenivore, the last of which differs in scope from “climatarian,” at least according to the New York Times food trend predictions for 2023, in that "it’s no longer about eating sustainably, which implies a state of preserving what is. A new generation wants food from companies that are actively healing the planet through carbon-reducing agriculture, more rigorous animal welfare policies and equitable treatment of the people who grow and process food." 

Other food writers and outlets are also on the beat. That includes the new media platform Whetstone, which routinely emphasizes environmental impact in its reporting across print and podcasting, and figures as mainstream as Mark Bittman, who publishes instructive guides to shopping for sustainable fish. (Civil Eats is also consistently excellent on these subjects, reporting widely on efforts farmers are making to address the effects of climate change.) This awareness of what we eat and how it gets to our plates has also been platformed at high-profile art institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which staged Food: Bigger than the Plate in 2019, bringing “together the politics and pleasure of food to ask how the collective choices we make can lead to a more sustainable, just and delicious food future."3 

In the case of Salmon: A Red Herring, politics are omnipresent, pushing pleasure entirely off the menu. The real focus is perception: why it matters and how it has been denaturalized, enabling us to participate in aesthetic manipulation — paradoxically — as blissfully unaware, though still visually discerning, consumers. Cooking Sections pinpoints this reality in one of the book's key theses: "Colour is the species we consume."

Salmon: A Red Herring is compact and convincing, with deep historical research alongside poetic analysis. As a tool of activist art, it's even more successful: I'm never going to be able to eat a piece of salmon without thinking about its path to my plate and what it took to get there looking the way it does. These individual starting points are essential for any societal reckoning with industrial food systems and their damages. It's intervention on a personal scale, indictment on a global one. 

The book’s pages are colored according to the Pantone hues that make up the Hoffman-La Roche SalmoFan™ palette, while each of the book’s 12 chapters (save for first and last) is prefaced by quotes that reference dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of "salmon." The inconsistency among the definitions indicates how unreliable a concept [salmon] is, but the best and most accurate is the artists’ own: [salmon] is “a colour bound to the body, a body bound to its own name.”

About those brackets: [salmon] is Cooking Sections' own shorthand, highlighting both the artificiality of contemporary foodstuffs and our complicity in erasing natural environmental realities through our rapacious visual preferences and biases. The punctuation underscores the artists’ overall argument, and it’s not just salmon that gets this treatment — there are digressions on [sparrows], [pigs], [cows], and [humans]. The brackets become a constant stylistic reminder that, like the modified [salmon] Cooking Sections decries, things are not what they seem, even if we persist in calling them by the same names we always have.

To understand how we got here, Cooking Sections traces the origins of manipulated color in food production, which they attribute to a desire for control in a world of uncertainty. They assert that color charts guiding this drive have a urological basis, at least in Europe, where diseases were once diagnosed by the shade of one’s urine. Our socialization into color as an indicator of health then spread to our relationship with foodstuffs, leading growers to go to great lengths to ensure a consistent look for their products. At the turn of the 20th century, oranges ripening too fast in the humid Florida climate, for example, were ready to be eaten while green, but growers felt obligated to synthetically dye them orange, "coated to match consumer expectations."

Cooking Sections further discusses the origins of dyes in feed through the DSM’s YolkFan™ grading system, and synthetic dyes like Carophyll Yellow, used to mimic a nutrient-rich yolk color from grasses and flowers that farmed chicken don't ever get to eat.4 They also point to the onetime enforced dyeing of margarine in the US as a political concession to a powerful dairy lobby. This obsession with color, and the role it plays in our capitalist, industrialized society, is summarized succinctly in their notion of “the colour economy.”  

Salmon: A Red Herring is an unsettling read, packed with references and provocations. In the hands of Cooking Sections, color is memory, asset, weapon, tool, mode of distinction and discrimination, and the defining factor of perception, whether the object of our gaze is in a frame or lies behind the fish counter.

To be sure, we’re all ensnared by the color economy. I myself am a willing participant: the socks I’m wearing as I type were marketed as the Pantone color code of Prince’s purple; that’s why I bought them. In the end, we’re not so different from salmon: they eat the lures they find attractive, and we do the same when we shop with our eyes. The beauty of a wild salmon’s true colors, acquired through diet, health, and mating, is the product of transformation only found in nature. But wild salmon is beautifully inconsistent and unpredictable. It's a contingency that the market, and we as socially conditioned consumers, won’t tolerate — even if doing so would help avoid spiraling environmental destruction.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to “like” it — that helps me find new readers. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Hello, friends old and new!

Have you ever been to an art fair? If you haven’t… don’t. They’re almost universally terrible. Especially if you go during previews, when the fairs are mobbed with collectors and art consultants, it’s impossible to see any art. This February, I made the calculated decision to go to Frieze, Felix, and Spring/Break a day after each one opened, with the hope that I could more comfortably navigate among the plebeians, after much of the art had already been sold and dealers could be a little more relaxed. 10/10 recommend.

I also highly recommend going into the fairs with an agenda, which in my limited-budget case is not about buying but about seeking out new artists (or new-to-me artists) for future exhibitions and, delightfully, for this newsletter. When you’re walking around with that lens on, the fairs feel less overwhelming and more like a giant staging ground for a very open-ended treasure hunt.

Before we get into my Top Ten Food-Art Fair Finds, a word about each of the fairs for the unacquainted: Frieze LA is very fancy, filled mostly with blue-chip galleries selling modern and contemporary art that starts in the tens of thousands and goes up steeply from there. This year they held the fair in two giant tents at the Santa Monica Airport, with special projects sharing outdoor space with lots of food options and bougie port-a-potties. Felix, perhaps my favorite of the three, was again at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Each gallery takes over a hotel room or cabana by the pool, and some of the best things, in my experience, can be found in the bathroom, hung over the toilet or propped in the shower. Spring/Break, which fashions itself as “curator-driven,” is the scrappiest of the fairs, spread throughout an airy (but manageably sized) warehouse in Culver City. After the pretension of Frieze and Felix, Spring/Break feels like a breath of fresh (Tecate-scented) air, where everyone is chatty and young artists are thrilled just to be showing there. I always leave feeling energized, even when my visit comes at the tail-end of several days of nonstop art-ing.

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Now that you’ve been briefed on this very belated but worthy content, let’s dig in!

1. Taylor Lee Nicholson ⟡ YARD SALE ⟡ Spring/Break

Taylor Lee Nicholson’s YARD SALE was the very last thing I saw during Frieze Week and it honestly made my achy feet (and guilt over time away from my kid) totally worth it. This exuberant Gesamtkunstwerk of Astroturf, papier-mâché hot dogs, and bedazzled tabloid covers was a VIBE. The installation’s rural Southern flavor came into focus as I chatted with Nicholson, who plucked from the grass a deranged ceramic figure of their grandmother pictured gleefully running over lawn snakes with a riding mower. A true character, Nicholson’s grandmother also makes an appearance in their artist statement, one of the best and most evocative I’ve ever read, which deserves quoting here in full:

I was raised on garbage. I ate hot dogs, Vienna sausages, Spam (the garbage parts of the pig). I watched a lot of Jerry Springer and The Price is Right, the spectacle and noise of this programming teaching me at an early age that poverty is loud. I also read a lot of tabloids, trash magazines that speculated who killed JonBenet Ramsey, and reveled in the sordid details of Princess Diana’s bloody death. These magazines had a fetish for things falling apart. And of course the occasional alien abduction or Wolf Boy.

As I was drinking dollar store soda and listening to Barker’s contestants scream out bids on washing machines, our house was sinking into the ground. In secret, my grandmother was stacking heaps of newspaper and tabloids in the basement to absorb as much water as she could to stave off the flood. She was keeping our white trash family afloat on a mound of molded paper pulp, slimy pink with mildew and smeared with Priscilla Presley. 

I’m a Garbage Person. I embrace ‘trash’ as both subject and material. I am haunted by decay, a gothic obsession with death and with things falling apart; ghost stories. Like a poltergeist, my practice is restless and hungry. I’m not really exploring supernatural horror, but rather material horror. My work aims to expose the grotesque beneath the veneer. This ‘bad,’ anti-art, like the culture that it critiques and echoes, is bingeable junk food. 

If you want some of Nicholson’s magical bingeable junk food for yourself, you can still buy individual works from YARD SALE here.

2. Milena Korolczuk ⟡ Raster ⟡ Felix

I really get a kick out of artists with incredible skill applying themselves to works that are small and anti-monumental, silly even — or at least not cloyingly self-serious. Polish-born, Oakland-based artist Milena Korolczuk, who runs Raster Gallery in Poznan, has made a series of more than a dozen photographs capturing ephemeral portraits she sculpts from the squished insides of Wonder Bread. The heads are palm-sized but detailed enough to be recognizable as famous figures such as Marina Abramović (above), Andy Warhol, Jay-Z, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and they’re always shown alongside the detritus of the sculpting process, as if the artist had simply found herself a bit bored at breakfast time.

3. Kyoko Idetsu ⟡ Nonaka-Hill ⟡ Frieze

I was lucky enough to catch Kyoko Idetsu’s New York debut at Bridget Donahue last December, for which the Tokyo-based artist had paired paintings and drawings with short texts written directly on the wall. Rendered in a cartoonish (but also very painterly) style, Idetsu’s work is diaristic, recording the relatable minutiae and emotional highs and lows of domestic life with a surreal deadpan reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s writing. (One painting in that show, of a little girl about to leap out of the frame, was accompanied by this passage: “A child in potty training was fidgeting, looking like she had to pee, when she suddenly started running.”)

In Idetsu’s solo booth at Frieze for LA gallery Nonaka-Hill (which helped organize her New York show), many of the paintings revolved around food or the act of eating. Or digesting, as in Not Assimilate, which encompasses two male figures side-by-side, their stomachs and intestinal tracts standing in for their bodies. One stomach contains a bowl of rice, a cup of soup, and a pair of chopsticks (complete with the dinnerware, as if they’d been gulped down whole), while the other harbors a hot dog, a mess of chili fries, and a ramekin of slaw. Bodily assimilation stands in for cultural assimilation, or refusal thereof. As ever, we are what we eat. Idetsu’s own narrative description for the work puts it succinctly: "A Japanese I know living in the U.S. told me that he eats rice and miso soup every morning. Stomach cannot assimilate. But they are in the same storm.”

4. Mike Chattem ⟡ Tchotchkes For The Apocalypse ⟡ Spring/Break

You might remember Mike Chattem’s “celebration of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, lobsters, and corn” from my 2022 art fair highlights. Chattem was back at Spring/Break this year with a solo booth called Tchotchkes for the Apocalypse, in which he envisions us at the end of human existence surrounded by bottles of ranch and wacky soft pretzels, sitting in a folding chair smoking a bong crafted from an exploded Costco-sized jar of mayo. Everything’s made of acrylic, foam, and resin — plastics that could probably survive a nuclear holocaust, and already look, in Chattem’s hands, like they’ve been warped by atomic blasts or invading fungi. Kindred in many ways with Taylor Lee Nicholson’s work, these objects are equal parts grim and goofy.

5. Robert Gober ⟡ Matthew Marks ⟡ Frieze

An oldie but a goodie, Robert Gober’s 1992–93 sculpture Short-Haired Cheese brought a smile to my face in Matthew Marks’ booth at Frieze. Clocking in at just 4 x 6 ¼ x 6 ½ inches, the work is so petite (and anemic in pallor) that it could easily be missed in the flashy chaos of a fair. Like many of Gober’s beeswax sculptures, Short-Haired Cheese has the sensibility of a Catholic relic tied (however dubiously) to the body of a saint, or of a miraculous object that somehow demonstrates the existence of a higher being. Of course it’s neither of those things, unless the saint is Meret Oppenheim, whose infamous furry teacup also viscerally conjoins hair and something meant to be put in (or on) the mouth. Where Oppenheim’s teacup alludes to lesbian love-making, Gober’s cheese also seems to suggest something sexy, its wedge shape and tufts of human hair nodding, perhaps, to the pubic region. (For some Gober ASMR, peep this video of Menil conservators primping another of the artist’s hairy cheeses.)

6. Jennifer Levonian ⟡ Adams and Ollman ⟡ Felix

Video art is scarce at fairs, probably because it requires patience and often doesn’t promise a ton of revenue for dealers. All the better for the videos that are there, which offer a moment of screen-comfort in the midst of so many static paintings and sculptures. I found myself enthralled by Jennifer Levonian’s cut-paper animation Cinnamon, Thunderstorm, a four-minute video that “investigates the space between cozy domesticity and unbridled wildness. After reading a magazine article titled ‘Six Tips for When You’re Dying Inside,’ a woman holed up in her apartment follows the directive to ‘create a tranquil corner’ in her home by lighting scented candles. The different smells combine and magically bestow her with the power to shoot flames out of her eyes and shapeshift into a wolf.”1 She also compulsively makes pots of red-sauced spaghetti, leaves the noodles in piles all over her kitchen, and then eventually serves them to a flock of pigeons while the caption "Do something nice for someone else" flashes on screen. Levonian's earlier animation, Buffalo Milk Yogurt, also uses food as the backdrop for a mental health episode, wherein a young man has a nervous breakdown in a gourmet grocery store, performing spells with a bottle of POM Wonderful and soaking his hair under the veggie misters.

7. Ruben Ochoa ⟡ CLASS: C ⟡ Frieze

When Ruben Ochoa was a grad student at UC Irvine in the early 2000s, he inherited a 1985 Chevy van from his parents, who had used it to deliver homemade tortillas during his childhood. Ochoa rehabbed it into a mobile gallery called CLASS: C, exhibiting the work of artists of color at lowrider shows, flea markets, and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. For the gallery’s 20th anniversary, and after many years of non-activity, Ochoa parked it outside of the main venue at Frieze and, in a nod to its original purpose, featured his own work: stacks of bronzed tortillas commissioned through a city grant program. The tortillas were more or less life-sized, but shown in the realistically scaled-down gallery space inside Ochoa’s van, they took on monumental proportions that would rival Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures or Joseph Beuys’s massive stacks of felt. As Jori Finkel put it in the New York Times, “the tortillas [also] resemble giant coins, touching on the idea that they represent his family’s currency.”

The installation was indeed all about food-making and -selling as livelihood. Partnering with an organization called Revolution Carts, Ochoa paired CLASS: C with several vividly colored tamale carts, aiming to feed hungry fair-goers and draw attention to the plight of the city’s many street vendors, who are constantly subject to police harassment, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and threats of displacement, not to mention hate crimes that have seen an uptick in recent years. The installation will have helped at least one tamalero/a directly: Maestro Dobel tequila, the project’s sponsor, bought one truck to gift to a vendor at the conclusion of Frieze.

8. Jake Clark ⟡ GAVLAK ⟡ Felix

Pink’s, for the uninitiated, is a hot dog stand that attracts droves of tourists in what is now a gallery district at the southwestern edge of Hollywood. It’s been many years since I had one of their dogs, but I remember it as fairly mediocre. Far more pleasing is Jake Clark’s oversized Pink’s-themed vessel, which lit up a corner of GAVLAK’s room at Felix. The jar (one of at least two made in homage to Pink’s) comes from a larger series of ceramics painted in the themes of classic American haunts, including Russ & Daughters, Canter’s, Mr. Chow, and Bay Cities Italian Deli (IYKYK), all rendered joyously in eye-popping technicolor reminiscent of the lost art of sign painting.

9. Andrew J. Greene ⟡ The Modern Institute ⟡ Frieze

By the time I arrived at Frieze, I had already seen dozens of highlights from the fair in Instagram Stories (my addiction of choice, which also dates me, tragically, as a geriatric millennial). It seemed like everyone I knew had posted a video of Andrew J. Greene’s mesmerizing fake cherry pie, set spinning atop a silver stanchion. Once I got there IRL, I was surprised to find that the work stands at 59 ½ inches tall, which, dear reader, was basically eye level for this petite viewer. The work itself has strange, disquieting proportions, with the hilariously tall stanchion occupying the vast majority of the work’s volume, its diameter not much wider than the white plate that caps it off.

Evocatively titled Timeless Symbols (Cherry Pie), the sculpture presents an odd collision of associations, from the classic Americana of Greene’s food choice (he’s made other such stanchions featuring shrimp cocktail and an olive martini) to the protection and restriction suggested by an imposing steel stanchion. Greene’s person-sized stanchions stand alone, utterly ineffective at keeping anyone from anything — though I suppose they play up what’s truly inaccessible here: the satisfaction promised by food that advertises nothing but its own plasticky self. Greene has played with these themes before, most notably in a sculpture that places a berry pie, decorated to look like the American flag, behind bars. The work, titled Study for Pie Jail 1, is a tongue-in-cheek read of American culture — one almost as pithy as the image you get when you click the CV on Greene’s website.

10. Paul McCarthy ⟡ LAND / Hauser & Wirth / The Box ⟡ Auxiliary Event

Increasingly, Frieze Week extends beyond the fairs to encompass auxiliary projects in far-flung parts of the city. This year, Hauser & Wirth partnered with Los Angeles Nomadic Division and The Box to open up Paul McCarthy’s deranged installation WS White Snow for a few precious days of viewing. I first saw this work when it debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2013, and had no idea that its utterly massive component parts (a deconstructed full-scale house, a small forest, and more) had been sitting, ever since, in a warehouse near downtown LA.

Frankly, the work had also been living rent-free in my head for a decade. It’s hard to describe the totality of WS White Snow. Like many of McCarthy’s other projects, it takes something that feels pure and deeply connected to childhood nostalgia — the Disney classic Snow White — and renders it utterly, irredeemably filthy. The filth is actual and moral, with the main narrative centered around what happens when the titular character, renamed White Snow, finds herself alone with the seven dwarves. (You can guess where that goes… and then imagine that it goes even further, to the far reaches of depravity.) The installation that visitors navigate is actually the set that was used to film the videos projected within it; the single-family home at the core of the installation is especially haunted by the course of filming, filled to the brim with props left exactly where they were used and cast off — props that include sex dolls, costumes, and lots and lots of food.

The kitchen (seen above) gives you a sense of the improvisatory chaos that McCarthy’s filming captured, fueled by alcohol, chocolate cake, and Wonder bread sandwiches. Bottles of ketchup in the living room allude to McCarthy’s work from the 1970s, which made prodigious use of America’s beloved condiment in viscerally disturbing performances and videos that are hard to watch and even harder to forget. As M.H. Miller has written, “It would be easy to argue that no other artist has so regularly degraded himself for public consumption.” In WS White Snow, we look through peep holes, lace curtains, and dirty windows to see the remnants of that degradation on full display. Emerging back into the daylight of Los Angeles, we have to ask ourselves: why are we so eager, so willing, to dwell in the space of disgust that McCarthy creates for us? Why did I drive 45 minutes to be grossed out?

Disgust, degradation, voyeurism, moral superiority: it’s all as irresistibly American as ketchup and cherry pie.

⟣ Honorable Mentions ⟢

🍰 Walid Raad / The Atlas Group ~ photos taken by a teenaged Raad of cakes made for Beiruti warlords and politicians (also available in NFT form!) 🍒 Kathleen Ryan ~ a giant cherry Tom Collins garnish 🥧 Wayne Thiebaud ~ cherry tarts and other delectables 🍹 Max Hooper Schneider ~ a trippy mountain landscape populated by miniature bottles 🥜 Elizabeth Atterbury ~ an exquisitely carved peanut 🍊 Penny Slinger and Polly Borland ~ just click the link, ok? 🥒 Roni Shneior ~ pickle jars, ceramics, tufts of hair 🥑 Erin Wright ~ bonsai and a scattering of avocados in the dark of night 🍓 Emily Marchand ~ an extravaganza of fruit, veg, eggs, and cigarettes

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to “like” it — that helps new readers find me. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Hello and happy February!

It’s full-on citrus season, so it feels like an appropriate time to celebrate the work of Ben Sakoguchi, who has been making paintings based on the format and motif of the vintage orange crate label for nearly 50 years. I first encountered Sakoguchi’s paintings in 2022, in Bel Ami’s booth at Frieze LA. I was charmed by some of the most recent additions to this long-running series, including several that referenced Covid with tongue-in-cheek commentary on cruise ships (“Cruisin’ with Covid” Brand Oranges, from Corona del Mar, CA) and a thoughtful homage to Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese physician who first alerted the world of the virus’s severity (“Dr. Whistleblower” Brand Oranges, from Death Valley, CA).

After that, it felt like I was seeing Sakoguchi’s paintings everywhere, coming to a head last fall, when I saw two of the orange crate paintings in Hilton Als’ gorgeous exhibition-as-portrait Joan Didion: What She Means, offering texture for Didion’s childhood years in the Golden State. Just days later, I read that Sakoguchi’s kaleidoscopic painting Comparative Religion 101 had been accepted then rejected from the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2022 California Biennial, which I had visited that week, none the wiser. The work had been dismissed, ostensibly, because one of its 15 panels includes a swastika, called manji in Japanese, painted with specific reference to Buddhism (where the symbol has a positive meaning, though Sakoguchi complicates that reading by aligning it with Japanese nationalism). The rejection came despite Sakoguchi’s thoughtful answers to a lengthy questionnaire the museum had sent him, essentially asking him to defend the painting and do the curatorial work of contextualizing it.

This act of censorship (conducted in private and then made public) put Sakoguchi’s work in the spotlight and inspired me to take a closer look at the orange crate paintings for Weekly Special. I’m very grateful to the artist’s wife, Jan Sakoguchi, and his studio manager, Jackie Tarquinio, for their prompt help answering my questions and providing all of the fabulous images you’ll see below.

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Ben Sakoguchi’s Orange Crate Paintings

From the 1880s until World War II, wooden crates of oranges grown in California were shipped out emblazoned with 10 x 11-inch full-color lithographic labels. A quick Google search for “orange crate labels” will turn up dozens of examples, many of them stunningly beautiful, selling not just oranges but the dream of California, verdant and blooming in the winter months of citrus harvesting, when the rest of the country is still in deep freeze. Many are also playful, with imagery that matches brand names such as Orbit, Wonderland, Shamrock, Miracle, and Eat-One.

Naturally all good and beautiful things come to an end, and after an eventual decline in wooden crate manufacturing, they were replaced by cardboard boxes printed with (comparatively boring) logos and brand information, making the once-ubiquitous labels unnecessary.

Several decades after orange producers retired their crate labels, painter Ben Sakoguchi started what has become a long-running series of paintings based on the format and conceit of the orange label, with a dizzyingly broad range of subjects drawn from sports, pop culture, contemporary politics, and historical events as divergent as the dropping of the atomic bomb and the wedding of Charles and Diana (one of a number of works commemorating doomed celebrity marriages).

Sakoguchi hadn’t always been eager to execute biting social and political commentary. As he wrote recently in response to a questionnaire about the meaning of his paintings, “In college, sixty-five years ago, I was taught that ‘fine art’ should NOT be political. It took me 10 years to unlearn this highly political concept, and another five to fully embrace using political subject matter in my work.”

Sakoguchi’s interest in war and violence, themes that recur across the orange crate paintings, stems in part from his own experience growing up in a Japanese internment camp in Poston, Arizona, where his family lived from 1942–45. Numerous of his paintings critique anti-Asian policies, including Yellow Peril, from 1974, and the atomic bomb painting above, made a year later. They also highlight the trauma of war, particularly for children, as in the horrifying Mickey Mask painting below.

Sakoguchi’s paintings are truly a mix of heavy and buoyant; just when it looks like he’s focused on something light, darkness enters back in. Among his many paintings spoofing modern art, for example, he swings from Bank on Frank Brand, making fun of Minimalism’s co-optation as corporate lobby art, to The Floor Belongs to Carl Andre, which draws a connection between Andre’s game-changing floor-bound sculptures and the final position of the body of Andre’s wife, artist Ana Mendieta, whom many believe was pushed from a window by Andre himself. (He was tried and acquitted for her murder, as detailed in a recent podcast.) As disturbing as the content is, I couldn’t help but laugh at the locale Sakoguchi had assigned to the brand: Carlsbad, California.

In this kaleidoscope of culture, there are truly joyful moments and truly heinous ones, examples of human excellence and perhaps more of human hypocrisy, hatefulness, and failure. Here are a few more of my favorites, which include tributes to Muhammad Ali (one of Sakoguchi’s most beautiful paintings, IMO) and baseballers Josh Gibson and Babe Ruth (with a subtle critique of the racialized terms by which athletes are often characterized), alongside a send-up of Rei Kawakubo’s maligned 1995 menswear collection (pulled from production because the garments resembled concentration camp uniforms) and a memorial to two reproductive health center employees shot to death by a “pro-life” activist in 1994.

As I’ve spent more time looking at Sakoguchi’s work, I’ve realized that the central conceit of these paintings — melding references from current and historical events with the bygone marketing language of California-grown oranges — allows the artist to offer stinging commentary without being overly didactic or humorless. Individually, these works strike me as anti-history painting, rejecting the monumental in favor of the commercial, ornamental, and ephemeral. But when we consider the massive scope of this entire — still ongoing! — series, it morphs into a deeply compelling collage of the past 80 years. It’s history painting in fragments, apropos of our post(post)modern age, where anything can be spectacle and the orders of magnitude that (ought to) separate royal weddings from incidents of mass violence have been flattened, ultimately rendered part of the same brutal news cycle that apportions coverage based on projected revenue.

There’s perhaps a more optimistic way of thinking about this notion of history painting in fragments, though — one that I discovered, incidentally, in this painting about a tortilla purported to feature the face of Jesus.

Sure, we could see Holy Tortilla Brand as mocking religious zealots. But we could also see the popularity of this tortilla as a symptom of the desire to find meaning — signs of the divine — in the quotidian, and to seek connection with a higher power as an escape from this messy, confusing, and cruel world. The more humble and unassuming the vehicle, the better.

One Last Bite

Naturally, Ben Sakoguchi’s work had me thinking about orange recipes, which happen to be peppered liberally throughout a brand new illustrated memoir scheduled to be released this March. Written by art historian Mallory M. O’Connor with her artist-husband John, The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art chronicles their lives through the meals they’ve eaten since their first date in spring 1962, after becoming fast friends in Wayne Thiebaud’s drawing class at the University of California, Davis. (They just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last month.) Mallory has kept a diary of every meal they’ve enjoyed, from that first date (John made sushi and Crab Louie) to a brunch they served for one of John’s former students (featuring paella and caramel sea salt ice cream with Kahlua) just a few weeks before the pandemic lockdown began.

With their permission, I’m sharing their recipe (and John’s painting) for Chocolate, Orange, and Almond Torte, which was served for John’s 48th birthday, on January 23, 1988, at their home in Rancho Micanopy, just south of Gainesville, Florida. The torte capped off a feast of cheese biscuits, beef filet with red wine sauce and mushrooms, potatoes with rosemary and garlic, green salad with chèvre, and French bread, served with a 1980 Beaulieu George de la Tour Private Reserve Cabernet — but it could just as well be the sweet ending to your next romantic dinner.

Chocolate, Orange, and Almond Torte

Serves 12

For the torte:

1 ½ cups blanched almonds, toasted

8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped (Lindt Swiss is among the best. Ghirardelli also makes a lovely chocolate baking bar that is 100% cacao unsweetened chocolate, although some folks will tell you that Ferrero Rocher is the all-time winner. Take your pick!)

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

6 large eggs, separated

1 cup sugar

½ cup orange juice

1 tablespoon grated orange zest

14 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

½ tsp sea salt

For the topping:

1 cup heavy cream

½ cup sugar

3 tablespoons orange marmalade

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and coat a 10-inch springform pan with cooking spray.

2. In a food processor, pulse the almonds and the chocolate until finely ground. Add the cocoa powder and pulse to combine.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, orange juice, and zest until thick and creamy. Beat in the chocolate-almond mixture and the melted butter.

4. In another bowl, beat the egg whites and salt until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture and pour it into the prepared pan.

5. Bake until the cake pulls away from the pan edge, about 50 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack before serving.

6. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the pan and invert the cake on a serving platter.

7. Whip the cream with the sugar until soft peaks form. Beat in the orange marmalade.

8. Cut the cake into wedges and top with the orange whipped cream. Garnish with a pinch of orange zest if you like.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to “like” it — that helps me find new readers. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Hello and happy new year! I hope you got the break you deserved. With an active preschooler running our household, there wasn’t much sleeping in, but we picked carrots at a farm; introduced him to Ratatouille, which remains one of my favorite animated films of all time (and he loved it); and gorged ourselves, on a rainy day in the Valley, on the best borekas I’ve ever had, which our child enjoyed nearly as much as the pickle he picked up and ate off the ground in front of a line of giggling customers. Not a bad two weeks.

Thanks to all for their sweet notes and emails about the Thiebaud tribute that closed out 2022. There will be more Thiebaud!!! But I’ve got lots of fun content planned before that, including:

a whole issue dedicated to C A K E 🍰 a guest-illustrated issue on food in poetry 🍒 an interview with Daniel Giordano, occasioned by his upcoming show at MASS MoCA (details below) 🍊 a post (or three) on food-art and conservation (it’s a sexier topic than it seems, promise) 🍯 Oldenburg’s cheeseburgers (and pretzels! with a recipe!) 🍔 and a rundown of the best food-art at the upcoming LA art fairs (in the style of this recap I wrote last year, which was too much fun not to repeat) 🥑

In the meantime, here are two “Best of 2022” recommendations to savor before you get totally swept up by the cultural offerings of 2023:

1. Watch The Menu, the dark and delightful spoof of haute cuisine and molecular gastronomy we’ve all been waiting for, now available on HBO; and 2. Read Memorial by Bryan Washington, a novel I finished a few weeks ago that will leave you a bit teary and also craving potato croquettes, among other Japanese home-cooked delights.

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MoMA Archives Assistant Molly Lieberman on Food-Art Ephemera

Just after I visited New York last spring, my dear friend Erica DiBenedetto, a curatorial assistant at MoMA, texted me photos of a display in the museum library titled Dining, Digging In, & Dishing Out. Erica did a little detective work and learned that the display was organized by Archives Fellow Molly Lieberman. Molly and I connected over our shared past at Oberlin College (where I was a curator and Molly was a student) and I asked if I could interview her about her food-focused project for Weekly Special.

First, a tiny bit about Molly: as Archives Fellow, she supported reference services for MoMA Archives by fulfilling Scan on Demand requests and paging materials for in-person visits — in other words, really crucial (and tedious) work to support art historical research. (In the first year, she told me, she “scanned 1,020 folders, which amounts to 73,920 pages of material in total.”) She also helps digitize AV materials and handles reference requests, and, since we struck up our correspondence, was promoted to Archives Assistant as she began her fifth year at MoMA!

Below you’ll find our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Thank you for agreeing to chat about your work on this display of food-related ephemera from MoMA’s archives! Can you give us an overall sense of the scope and content of your project?

We have a display case in the Library reading room, between the periodicals and reference desk, where we exhibit special collections items. When we reopened to public researchers in March 2022, I thought we could use the case to exhibit items related to food and dining, as a celebration of public gathering. The primary audience for this display is the staff and public researchers who visit our Archives and Library reading rooms. The Archives and Library staff also spends considerable time in this space, so it was also something we could enjoy.  

How did this project begin? Was there a particular object that inspired you to put together a display on food and dining?

One way that I try to represent the physical quality of archival materials while scanning documents is by capturing any information on a document’s verso. I was scanning a folder of documents related to the influential exhibition Americans 1963 when I found a note by [Pop artist] James Rosenquist that had been scrawled on the back of a menu. Out of my own personal interest, I started taking note of other folders I came across that contained menus. Then when I had the opportunity to make a display in the Library’s vitrine, I did a wider, more intentional search for such materials in our collections.

Can you describe the process of research that led you to assemble this particular group of objects?

My research process has been greatly influenced by my colleagues in the Archives—they have taught me that good research allows the primary source to shape the historical narrative. While scanning documents for researchers I constantly encounter unique historical documents by chance. As a visual artist myself, I tend to notice the material qualities of the documents I handle, such as their condition, weight, color, and graphic elements. My material-centered approach to archival research led me to broadly consider how menus are traces of social gatherings in the art world: opening dinners, brainstorming sessions in restaurants, artist-cooked meals, and food-inspired projects.

After my initial discovery of the Rosenquist menu, I performed a keyword search on our archival holdings page. Our descriptive finding aids led me to find a sketch of the staged performance of Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin on the back of a menu from the Spring Street Restaurant (also known as the Spring Street Bar, located at 162 Spring St.) in the Calvin Tomkins Papers. By happy accident, while I was searching for documentation on FOOD (the famed artist-run restaurant in SoHo), I also discovered a second menu from the Spring Street Restaurant in the Avalanche Magazine Archive. Finding duplicate menus from the same restaurant was not only a confirmation of the interconnectedness of our collections, but paints a picture of the downtown artist community in the early 1970s. Side by side, they conjure up an image of Calvin Tomkins, Robert Wilson, Willoughby Sharp, and Liza Béar sitting at adjoining tables, grabbing a bite after a show and casually taking notes on the backs of menus.

I know we’re not supposed to have favorites… but are there objects from this project that you especially love?

I love how the first grouping of objects I’ve chosen, those in the Dining category, transport me back to MoMA’s early days. I found these sample menus for a dinner in honor of the exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishing (1941) in one of the exhibition’s planning files. To paint the picture: sample menu “A” includes “Jubilee Soup, Vol au Vent of Scallops and Mushrooms, Fillet of Beef Jardiniere, Peach Melba Cake, Coffee and Mints.” Sample menu “B” has “Alligator Pear Salad,” “Cold Virginia Ham,” and “Chicken and Sweetbreads Toulouse,” among other dishes. What a joy to learn that they were eating alligator pear (an early term for avocado)! If the dishes themselves don’t feel dated, the prices quoted at $2.50 and $1.85 should definitely give us a sense that this was a different time in New York. 

My colleagues also love the menus and accompanying photos of “Function at the Junction,” a country and western dinner dance held as a fundraiser for MoMA’s Junior Council in 1981. According to the program, the fundraiser had a mechanical bull, cowboy dance instruction, and music by a group called The Dixie Doughboys. What we really wish we could track down is the fabulous jackets worn by the attendees, with the MoMA insignia on the back. If we ever find these jackets, I petition to have them be the official uniform of the Archives!  

Were there additional objects you would have included if you had had more space?

Oh yes, I had to edit down quite a bit! I wish I could have included the “Trustees' Dinner Menu on the occasion of the opening of the new Museum building” from May 8th, 1939, which famously has “Turtle Soup” on the menu, from the A. Conger Goodyear Scrapbooks. If I had had even more space, I also would have liked to include some documents that fleshed out the projects around food that were happening downtown in the 1970s, such as:

• Contact sheets of Vito Acconci’s Rubbing Piece (1970), in which the artist spent one hour at Max’s Kansas City Restaurant “sitting alone at a booth, during the ordinary activity at the restaurant. With the fingers of my right hand, rubbing my left forearm and producing a sore,” a performance also documented in the Avalanche magazine archives at MoMA. 

• A hand-drawn draft of “FOOD’S Family Fiscal Facts” (1972), a five-page document that includes a preparatory layout sketch and one list each of “financial facts,” “food facts,” miscellaneous facts, and participants. It was originally published in Avalanche 4 (Spring 1972), on the 7th unnumbered page of advertisements preceding the main content of the magazine.

• A photocopy of a holographic postcard that George Maciunas sent to Alison Knowles with the score of his version of Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch (1971), which is part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives.

Are there any interesting connections between these archival objects and works in MoMA’s permanent collection?

A couple of Daniel Spoerri’s silkscreen tablecloths from his series 31 Variations on Meal are held in the Department of Drawings and Prints, and accompanying photo documentation can be found in our Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. These photos, which I chose to include in Dining, Digging In, & Dishing Out, not only represent Jon Hendricks’s meticulous documentation of the Fluxus movement, but show how archives can help us contextualize ephemeral art.

When the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection was acquired in 2009, MoMA staff was tasked with dividing certain items in the collection among the curatorial Drawings and Prints department, and the Archives and Library (then two separate departments), depending on various preservation and access needs. We found that there were many ephemeral Fluxus artworks that now exist only as written descriptions, performance scripts, or photographs, bringing into question these divisions between document and artwork.

I find the relationship between the Archive and the curatorial collection to be fascinating in this case, really bringing to light some of the conceptual challenges in acquiring an archive within an institution.  

The Snack Pack

A few small bites to close out this issue 🍴👋

🦀 So Many Food-Art Exhibitions, So Little Time

Here are just a few of the dozens of food-art shows up right now around the world:

• Things: The History of Still Life, The Louvre, Paris, through January 23

• Adam Higgins: My Salad Years, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, through February 4

• by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective, BAMPFA, Berkeley, through February 12

• Katie Butler: Pomp and Circumstance, Hesse Flatow, New York, through February 18

• Sam Keller: Weird Energy, Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York, through Feb 18

• Stephanie Shih: Open Flowers Bear Fruit, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, through March 12

• Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, through April 17

• The Legacy of Cacao, La Plaza Cocina, Los Angeles, through April 30

• Stephanie H. Shih: My Sweetie Has No Pockmarks 我寶貝沒有麻子, Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, NY, through May 14

• The Meal, Dom Museum, Vienna, through August 27

And coming soon!

• Daniel Giordano: Love from Vicki Island, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, opening February 4

• Potluck, Hashimoto Contemporary, Los Angeles, opening February 18

• Nic Dyer: Breadcrumb, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, opening February 18

• All Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, opening April 14

🥐 A Reddit Where People Staple Bread to Trees

Why is this a thing?! I don’t know, but I’m grateful to Bon Appetit for reminding me about this delightful Reddit community, which is now 317k strong. I’m very tempted to buy a loaf and get to it, especially around Malibu, where someone stapling bread to trees probably wouldn’t be the weirdest sight on a Tuesday afternoon. The hardest part would be deciding what kind of loaf to use—or whether to employ, say, a cracker or a tortilla, if only to foment intense debate on the ontological bounds of “bread.”

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to “like” it — that helps me find new readers. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Hello and happy holidays! I hope this email finds you well, having survived gatherings with family and/or the worst of the arctic weather (is it still cold out there beyond California??). Either way, I hope you’re as full of holiday treats as we are. We had a week of latkes and donuts, capped off with the best Chrismukkah meal of all, a dim sum feast from Din Tai Fung. Life is good.

For this last issue of 2022, I considered some kind of listicle — best food-artworks I’d seen this year, best new books on food art, etc. — and then I realized I’d been sitting on the almost-finished tribute to Wayne Thiebaud that I began writing in January. He died a year ago yesterday, on Christmas Day, 2021, at the inspiring age of 101, and it seemed as good a moment as any to finally finish this remembrance. With the possible exception of Claes Oldenburg, there has been no more prolific an artist dedicated to images of food than Thiebaud, who, like Oldenburg, will no doubt appear in Weekly Special again and again, as no single post could possibly do justice to his oeuvre.

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Here’s a belated first taste. Let’s dig in.

Rediscovering Wayne Thiebaud

A year ago, when I first read that Wayne Thiebaud had died, my reaction was, Whoa, he was still alive? (When you live to 101, I’m guessing you encounter this kind of incredulity a lot.) My second thought was, I love his work and I’ve seen a good deal of it, so why do I know so little about him? Thiebaud feels ubiquitous, his paintings probably recognizable to a broad swath of the American public, but in all of my coursework in modern and contemporary art, never once did a professor of mine show his paintings or drawings in class, nor have us read anything about him. I’ve tacitly absorbed Thiebaud, encountering his work in museums (and museum gift shops) and on the internet and in Facebook birthday posts by my friend Katia Zavistovski (who you may remember as the author of this fantastic WS guest post about Vija Celmins, a kindred spirit of Thiebaud in her early days).

Why is Thiebaud absent from the academic canon, overshadowed by Warhol and Lichtenstein and a handful of other Pop stars? I pondered this question in the weeks after his passing, reading more about him to fill in my own severely lacking knowledge. (I especially loved this well-researched profile by Martin Kuz, published in the October-November 2010 edition of Thiebaud’s hometown monthly, Sactown Magazine.) I came to understand that the reasons for Thiebaud’s back burner positioning are several, and in unpacking why he hasn’t been more prominent in scholarly art history, I also found new reasons to love his work.

Thiebaud’s sidelining begins with the mantra of real estate agents everywhere: Location, location, location. You know how the New York Times publishes an annual piece in which they “discover” that LA has art and food worth the nation’s attention? Well, that East Coast cultural bias has deep, deep roots. Thiebaud was a California artist through and through, and the canon of mid-century art has always been myopically centered in New York, despite loads of art history produced in the last few decades aiming to upend that misconception. Thiebaud debuted his food paintings in New York in 1962, attracting positive critical attention and selling works to major collections, including MoMA, which bought from that show his delectable painting Cut Meringues. But he didn’t live in the city (save for a sabbatical year in the late ’50s) and wasn’t really part of the brash, incestuous milieu that eventually became known as Pop.

Thiebaud’s physical and emotional distance from Pop didn’t stop galleries and critics from aligning his work with it, though, as a lazy shorthand for what he was up to. The art world likes to periodize and categorize, smushing a bunch of artists together whose work is actually quite diverse. Sure, sometimes these artificial groupings into “styles” or “movements” can help articulate the attitude of a historical moment. But just as often, these groupings flatten difference and make it harder to contend with what we’re looking at because it doesn’t totally conform to what we think we know about it based on whatever group it supposedly belongs to.

Thiebaud has suffered this art-historical smushing because his work, at surface level, appears Pop enough: his still lifes capture everyday objects in a relatively straightforward way, akin to Oldenburg’s lumpy sculptures of cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, Warhol’s soup cans and bananas, and Lichtenstein’s glasses of Coke and bowls of fruit.

From the dawn of Pop to the present, however, there’s been debate about what Pop is all about. Some argue that it offers a critique of capitalism and industrial production and the increasingly oppressive ubiquity of advertising, and others argue that any such critique is mere projection, that Pop is celebratory or observational, not political. (I tend to believe that these positions aren’t mutually exclusive, and the ambivalence of the work mirrors our own ambivalence — the way we yo-yo between pleasure and guilt — as consumers under late capitalism.)

Whatever you think Pop is, Thiebaud’s work is something else. Where Pop is deadpan (whether political or not), Thiebaud is sincere, nostalgic, melancholic. As Michael Kimmelman wrote in his obituary in the Times, “To Mr. Thiebaud, the humble objects and everyday people and friends he painted were touching and deserved respect. Like him, they remained true to themselves, a quality his art celebrated.”

His art also celebrated the wonder of paint on canvas. Look at the brushstrokes in Cut Meringues and tell me this isn’t an artist who loves his craft — an artist who would later say, “it has never ceased to thrill and amaze me, the magic of what happens when you put one bit of paint next to another.” It’s the magic of light and shadow, which, in Thiebaud’s hands, feels pointedly modern, with swoops of meringue rendered in thick brushstroke, almost like a duck-rabbit visual experiment where the strokes are mere paint and then you squint and all of a sudden they’ve transformed into meringue, only to deflate back into luscious brushstroke again.

That painterliness separates Thiebaud from his Pop contemporaries, and also from the uncomplicated, feel-good kitsch of Norman Rockwell, another artist who seems superficially related in his focus on Americana. Thiebaud’s materials announce themselves in a way they never do in Rockwell, where paint is merely a vehicle for storytelling, always subservient to the image. (To that point, Thiebaud talked of being inspired, somewhat surprisingly, by de Kooning, whereas Rockwell, according to an anecdote told by his son, was utterly baffled by the same.)

Thiebaud also isn’t afraid to darken a counter of fluffy meringues with heavy cast shadow, a device he often uses to introduce both dimension and mild foreboding into his paintings, bringing the vibe closer to the urban alienation of Edward Hopper than the small town idyll of Rockwell. One of my favorite Thiebaud paintings knits all of these distinctions together, articulating both his penchant for subtle disquietude as well as his non-Pop-ness, his singularity among peers who preferred coolness and detachment.

It's a simple, straightforward painting of a roast beef dinner, a "trucker's supper," according to the subtitle of the work, which is in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. Unlike the many Thiebaud paintings of dessertscapes, which seem to barely acknowledge an embodied viewer, this dinner is set for us. Neatly arranged on a white expanse of table, we have a generous slab of roast beef coated with gravy, a pile of steak fries, and a modest tomato-and-lettuce salad, complete with two slices of white bread topped with two generous pats of butter, and a full glass of milk to wash it all down. The cast shadows are heavy, suggesting that we're facing strong light coming from somewhere in front of us—which means we're probably not sitting at a diner counter, nor at a side-lit table by windows looking out onto the street.

Where, then, are we supposed to be? This might be grossly modernist of me, but I think we're in Thiebaud's studio, or, if that seems too intimate, then in the space of the art gallery. Where else is there such slippage between thick, glossy oil paint and a slick of brown gravy or a plop of salad dressing? Thiebaud loved the familiar and the everyday, but his works never aim to fool you into thinking they're anything but paintings, representations of things quite apart from the things themselves. He emphasizes that here even in the white ground, which, far from being flat and undifferentiated negative space, is activated with thick brushstrokes that encircle each of the elements of the meal, making their forms pop.

The sight of a real roast beef dinner hits me in the nose and the gut, no doubt triggering brain signals that generate saliva and stomach rumbles. This painting of a roast beef dinner has an entirely different effect: set for one, it's enticing in theory but also a bit lonely, familiar but also defamiliarized in its lack of context (the white tabletop seems to go on forever) and in the combination of bright light and stark shadow, which gives the illusion that everything is levitating. This roast beef dinner strikes the eye and the heart more than the gut, engaging curiosity and nostalgia, maybe even empathy when we imagine the trucker, out on the road and apart from his family, who would have sat down to this kind of meal when Thiebaud painted it in 1963.

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For Further Eating

Let’s end this issue on a sweet note, shall we? Contemplating Thiebaud’s sea of meringue pies and anticipating the avalanche of citrus awaiting us at January farmer’s markets put me in mind of key lime pie, which made me realize that, despite keenly following Nicole Rucker’s rise in the LA food world, I’d never had a taste of her signature version. So I paired a visit to MOCA with a stop at Grand Central Market, where Rucker runs the bakery stand Fat & Flour.

I ordered my slice ahead of time to ensure they wouldn’t run out, but then asked the reluctant guy behind the counter to let me photograph the whole pie because it was mesmerizing and a lot sexier than my boxed slice.

See?

The pie itself did not disappoint, its sweetness expertly calibrated to complement the tart key limes. The bottom was a teensy bit soggy, but I prefer that to a hard, overbaked cookie crust that requires a jackhammer and threatens to strike neighboring parties (or worse, wind up on the floor), and the silky smooth custard and airy meringue were delicious enough to forgive minor flaws elsewhere.

Lest you non-Angelenos hate on me for sharing these photos of pie you can’t have (which yes, I ate outside in the middle of “winter” and it was glorious), here’s the recipe! Rucker published it in her 2019 cookbook Dappled, and the LA Times provided a public service by reprinting it shortly thereafter. I have yet to test it at home, but please report back if you do!

Nicole Rucker’s Key Lime Pie

Ingredients

• 1½ cups graham cracker crumbs

• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

• 1 teaspoon kosher salt

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

• 6 medium limes

• 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk

• 4 large egg yolks

• 1 cup cold heavy whipping cream

• ¼ cup sour cream

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Lightly coat a 9-inch pie plate (not deep-dish) with nonstick cooking spray.

2. Make the crust: Combine the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, salt and melted butter in a large bowl and stir until moist crumbs form. Transfer to the prepared pie plate and press evenly into the bottom and up the sides of the plate (but not over the rim).

3. Bake the crust until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Leave the oven on.

4. Make the filling: Finely grate 1 tablespoon zest from the limes into a large bowl, then halve the limes and squeeze ½ cup juice. (You may not need all 6 limes.) Add the condensed milk and egg yolks and whisk until all the egg yolks have been incorporated and the zest is speckled throughout the mixture. Pour into the cooled crust.

5. Bake until the filling is set around the edges and the center wobbles slightly when touched, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely, at least 2 hours.

6. In a large bowl, whisk the heavy cream and sour cream with an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, or by hand, until soft peaks form; do not overbeat. Pile the cream on top of the pie and swirl and swoosh with a spoon or rubber spatula. Refrigerate the pie for at least 3 hours before serving.

The pie can be refrigerated for up to 5 days… if you could possibly go that long without devouring the whole thing.

Thank you for reading!

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You’re the best. See you again in 2023!

‘Tis the season for gift guides, and here’s yet another — but I daresay it’s the funnest one you’ll receive in your inbox this year, with all kinds of objects that look like oysters, shrooms, croissants, corn cobs, salami, and more! Stressed that you didn’t complete your shopping during all of the dizzying sales for Black Friday (which now starts on Wednesday?!), Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday? Here’s your answer. You can’t go wrong with any of these gems.

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Happy Holidays, friends. Let’s dig in!

This Week’s Special: Your 2022 Holiday Gift Guide!

Ornaments in Every Food Group

$8 and up from John Derian

Our Jew-ish family doesn’t do Christmas, but if we did, our tree would be decked out in these handblown glass ornaments from John Derian. I can see a whole New York deli theme, with bagels and lox, caviar, sausages, pickles, pretzels, milkshakes, cheesecake — all of my favorite things. It’s almost tantalizing enough to make me buy a Hanukkah bush. Almost.

A Book About Eggs

$50 from Taschen

This season, there are dozens and dozens of books to recommend, but none quite so perfect for Weekly Special as The Gourmand’s Egg: A Collection of Stories & Recipes. Edited by food critic Ruth Reichl and arts writer Jennifer Higgie, it’s the first book in a new series The Gourmand is publishing with Taschen, and it celebrates what is, IMO, the world’s most perfect food as it appears in stories, recipes, and works of art. The book includes sumptuous full-page photos of works by Sarah Lucas (above), Andy Warhol, Urs Fischer, Bobby Doherty, and many others. If you wanna make it a touch more extravagant, pair it with a blown-glass egg by Blown Away winner Deborah Czeresko (from $100 to $310), who also sells slices of bacon (from $315 to $370).

Giant Corn Stool

$245 from Third Drawer Down

Nothing can make a guest smile like food-shaped furniture. This corny little number can function as a stool, or with the addition of a glass top, as a sturdy side table. And while you’re on Third Drawer Down’s website, don’t sleep on their extensive collection of tea towels ($36), with great designs based on the work of Faith Ringgold, Louise Bourgeois, David Shrigley, the Guerrilla Girls, and many more. Use ‘em in the kitchen or pin them up anywhere as decor.

(Paper) Pad of Butter

$10 from Urban Outfitters

I can’t think of a better stocking stuffer for someone who needs paper at hand for all of their rich (or salty) ideas. This butter-shaped pad is ideal for a Secret Santa gift, too, but could also pair quite nicely with the giant corn stool and a bucket of Maldon ($24.78) for a more fabulous themed surprise.

An Epic Mushroom Gift Set

Mushroom People magazine: $22 from Broccoli Mag // DIY grow kit: $30 from North Spore // lion’s mane tincture: $30 from Myco Myco // customizable lamps: $150 from Sofiest Designs

Fungi-obsessed friend in your life? Look no further than this DIY gift set, which encompasses the whimsical, the edible, the pharmacological, and the psychedelic. (For something even more high-brow, check out Atelier Édition’s John Cage: A Mycological Foray, $60, with optional postcard box supplement, $17.) Throw in a copy of Andrea Gentl’s brand new cookbook Cooking with Mushrooms ($27.90), wrap it all in this gorgeous Peter Max-inspired paper ($24, but worth it), and add a John Derian ornament or two (from $10 to $50), and you’ll have one very happy forever friend.

Surrealist Props for Creepy Cool Dinner Parties

$34 and up from Gohar World

After following @lailacooks on IG for quite a while, wistfully admiring her offbeat, baroque dinners from afar, I was tickled to see Laila Gohar, the woman behind the account, profiled in the New Yorker this fall. It’s doubtful I’ll wind up eating her goods at a Paris Fashion Week party anytime soon… but I can bring some Gohar vibes to my own dinner table with salami and smoked mozzarella candles (from $34 to $38) and a surreal egg chandelier ($298, eggs not included). Send these links to a lover who needs a hint about what you want, and then start party-planning.

A Croissant That Shines

$85 from Food52

During the fabulous Japanese breakfast service I had last week at Konbi Ni, I was mesmerized by the sight of a glowing croissant and quickly googled where I could get one. Now you can too! The craziest part: it’s a real croissant that’s been preserved to stave off mold. Pure magic that could light up a table, a countertop, or even — why not? — a nightstand.

The Most Delicious New Yorker Cartoons

starting at $100 from Condé Nast

I love New Yorker cartoons and New Yorker cartoonists love to joke (in their New Yorker way) about all things food. On the Condé Nast site, you can order prints of any cartoon from a past issue, including ones that would be well suited for foul-mouthed pasta lovers, devout bakers, unabashed meat-eaters, carb-loving hairdressers, stressed home cooks, anyone with a kid who likes to “help” in the kitchen, cilantro haters, cheeseheads who like cheesy humor, cheeseheads who like monster movies, the gluten obsessed (or the gluten-free, if you fancy a good troll), friends on the dating app circuit, Mad Men fans, chocolate fiends, aspiring chefs, reluctant salad-eaters, spiritual potheads, people who love bagels and hate lines (most everyone?), and admirers of Ratatouille. Spend $100 for a small 8x8-inch print or up to $729 for a massive framed and matted version.

The Spiciest Spices

$2 and up from Penzey’s

The packaging of Penzey’s spices tells you right away that they are not, as one of my grad school classmates would say, “hipster bullshit.” (That bullshit was usually some LA restaurant I was dragging him to, where the food was bomb and the prices were… less cute.) No, Penzey’s is a down-to-earth Wisconsin-based spice purveyor that sells legit pantry staples while also being incredibly vocal about their progressive politics, even — or especially — when it might hurt the bottom line. They speak truth to power (one of the tabs at the top of their homepage reads “About Republicans” and the content is brutal) and they create addictive spice blends with slightly cringey names that would make for ideal stocking stuffers for family members of all political persuasions. Subversive spices, y’all. Highly recommend.

A Maximalist Cake for Any Occasion

Varies by baker and size/complexity, starting at around $100

Maximalist baking took off during the pandemic and has now been the subject of a handful of features in the New York Times and elsewhere. Fame, however, has not made these bakers totally inaccessible for normal people with a little extra cash to spend on a bespoke cake with flavor and design unlike anything you can get at your local bakery. Place an order now for a special person who deserves to be celebrated in 2023 — and if you want the cake to count as a holiday gift, you can always drop a hint that something spectacular is on the way with a handmade I.O.U.

All of these bakers have robust IG accounts, with ordering details on their profile pages. Clockwise from the left: @frostedhag in New York; @dreamcaketestkitchen in Chicago; @yip.studio_ in New York (with a strawberry-bedecked cake made for Harry Styles); all-vegan @rustcakes in Berlin; dairy-free @gigislittlekitchen in New York; @deaux_baker in Austin, TX; and @yungkombucha420 in New York. Not pictured, but also fabulous: @crybaby.cakes in Toronto, who has perfected the buttercream squiggle.

The Coolest Stuff for the Kids in Your Life

There are so many great food gifts for littles, it’s hard to summarize. Kids Eat in Color, an org that encourages kids to overcome picky eating, has published an incredibly useful list of book recommendations by age and theme, including one of our family faves, Dragons Love Tacos ($17.66), the cute (and slightly horrifying) We Are Fungi ($7.97), and the charmingly erudite abcedarian A is for Artichoke ($9.29), which introduced our three-year-old to the word “ganache.” (Thanks, Grandma Martha!) We also love these indestructible sensory stones in the shape of various breads, fruits, and pizza toppings ($29.95 per set), and have our eye on the new food truck fleet from Norman and Jules ($108), perfect for a budding entrepreneur.

For That Person Who Has Everything: Give Back Instead

I distinctly remember receiving a certificate for ducks when I was a kid. Someone had donated to Heifer International in my name, making it possible for a struggling family far away to invest in ducks for their own sustenance. It’s now become Hanukkah tradition in our family to donate to a worthy cause on one of the eight nights, and this year, I plan on giving to World Central Kitchen. Founded in 2010 by chef José Andrés, this extraordinary nonprofit shows up to scenes of natural disasters and manmade tragedies to ensure that people who are suffering get a filling, locally sourced meal. Right now, WCK is at the Ukrainian border (where they’ve been serving food for months) and in flooded villages in Pakistan, and there’s no end to the critical work they do. Donate cash, crypto, or stocks here.

A Few More Quick Gift Ideas Just Because I Love You, Dear Readers

Negroni and mortadella stickers. Really dope kiddush cups and hanukkiahs. Tenugui cloths in every pattern. A 1000-piece brunch puzzle. Challah covers. One of the best still-life exhibition posters I’ve ever seen. Gouda, burrata, and spaghetti hats. An orange surprise ball. A t-shirt emblazoned with Guy Fieri holding a giant hot dog. And a Japanese snack box subscription.

Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Hello! It’s been a minute. Since I last landed in your inbox, I’ve survived a big exhibition install, our first sort-of-post-pandemic family vacation, a heat wave sans central air, a stomach bug, an opening that we quasi-self-catered, an East Coast work trip, and the High Holy Days. And I still woke up today excited to finally wrap up this Fall Smörgåsbord to share with you!

I debuted the Smörgåsbord last year after I had accumulated so many fun tidbits that I’d never be able to write about in depth but didn’t want to see languish in my Notes app. I’m fond of this quick-and-dirty format, which I’ve started to incorporate into other editions of Weekly Special under the header “The Sampler.” The Smörgåsbord is an amped-up “Sampler,” more like a back-to-school snack pack from Costco (fun-sized Cheetos are life) than a shared appetizer. I hope at least one of these items will send you down a rabbit hole of internet delight… from which you will emerge and forward this to all of your besties. TIA!

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Let’s dig in, friends.

Fall Smörgåsbord, 2022 Edition!

🍝 Binging “The Bear”

I devoured all of “The Bear” — about a young chef called home to his family’s gritty sandwich shop in Chicago after his brother’s suicide — in two sittings. The show has inspired a very loud chorus of critical praise and I honestly don’t have anything smart to add to reviews that highlight the show’s depiction of toxic masculinity in restaurant culture, or its raw treatment of grief and addiction. All I can say is that I hope we see more of Marcus, played by Lionel Boyce, in season two; his fermentation experiments and quest for the perfect donut offer comic relief and a needed break from the pressure-cooker of The Bear’s otherwise violently chaotic kitchen, and I desperately want to know what flavor that winning donut was.

Next on my watch list: the recently remastered feminist classic “Daisies,” which features an epic food fight.

👌 Sexy Oysters

Fawn Rogers makes sexy paintings of oysters. Her show at Wilding Cran Gallery featured extreme closeups of fingers prying open these luscious bivalves in a way that emphasizes their fleshiness. Pearls abound, layering on the innuendo. The lewdness of her paintings reminds of me Stephanie Sarley’s very NSFW IG, wherein she posts videos of naughty things she’s done with (and to) fruit. Both Rogers and Sarley make work that radicalizes pleasure and upends our expectations about pornography and obscenity — and I dare you to look the same way at an oyster or a peach again.

🥗 Conserving Food-Art (and Other Biological Materials)

The physical, ethical, and philosophical challenges of conserving contemporary art made with non-traditional, often organic materials, has been a subject of increasing interest among curators, conservators, and art historians. (That includes me; I’ve written about such issues in the work of Hannah Wilke here.) For my fellow art nerds (and even for some of you brave civilians!), I highly recommend the Getty’s recently released digital publication Living Matter, which contains, among other delights, these essays:

• Can We Use the Concept of Programmed Obsolescence to Identify and Resolve Conservation Issues on Eat Art Installations? by Claudia María Coronado García

• The Eternal Metabolic Network: Fluxus, Food, and Ecofeminism by my lovely colleague Natilee Harren, whose writing appears in the first issue of Weekly Special!

• The Life-Death Movement of Fruits, Tubers, and Vegetables in Nydia Negromonte’s POSTA by Magali Melleu Sehn

• Killing with Kindness? The Challenges of Conservation and Access for Living Matter by Marcia Reed

• A Crumb(ling) Display: Conserving Bread in the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb by Mirta Pavić, Jasna Jablan, Ivana Bačić, and Harald Fitzek

• Murmelte Instrumente: The Body, Like a Hand to an Instrument — all about work made with and about breast milk — by my dear artist friend Kelly Kleinschrodt

🌭 Two Exhibitions of Food-Art on View in New York

Nafas @ The Invisible Dog Center, Brooklyn, NY — closing Oct 15

Curated by Invisible Dog director Lucien Zayan, this exhibition brings together 36 artists who work with food AND stages a five-week-long festival of events. There are still three events to go, including a dinner celebrating the cookbook Leaked Recipes (which I wrote about here) and a concert called Fruit Scores, by Marisa Tornello.

Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate @ Museum of the City of New York, NY — on view through September 30, 2023

This exhibition, which debuted at the V&A in London, is “anchored around issues of sustainability, labor justice, and equitable access to food, [exploring] the ways in which artists and designers are developing solutions to global and local challenges.” The spectacular centerpiece of the show is Mary Mattingly’s Biosphere, which explores the promise of saline agriculture. I love that the show has such an extended run, allowing for Mattingly’s biosphere to truly grow into fruition, rather than function merely as the gallery-bound extension of an idea being tested elsewhere.

PLUS: On the other side of the country, there’s a charming show up in Portland, Oregon, on view through December 3, celebrating food in the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, with lots of kid-friendly programs.

💻 The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A while back, I subscribed to emails from Atlas Obscura and their food-based subsidiary Gastro Obscura, and I always find something weird and worthwhile in their digests. Here are a few of my favorite finds:

• A Sourdough Library

• A Ham Cam (for a ham that also has its own Twitter)

• A compendium of inedible roadside attractions

• A tattooed pork belly

• A viscerally distressing piece about America’s love of aspic

🍮 When Computers Make Food-Art

Not long after the premiere of AI software DALL-E, I started seeing images of food that the software had generated — almost always of a terrifying variety (see above) — and couldn’t help but be intrigued.

For the uninitiated, DALL-E (now operating in an updated version called DALL-E 2) is a form of artificial intelligence that can create images based on descriptions entered in natural language. The idea is to imagine something very specific that doesn’t already exist as an image, and ask DALL-E to make it for you. There are all sorts of legal and ethical complications raised by software like this, from fair use questions to the much more concerning potential for very sophisticated deepfakes… but artists with less insidious motives are having fun with all the weird, wacky, and magical images DALL-E is capable of producing.

One of the most interesting qualities of the software, in fact, is that DALL-E doesn’t just give you one image in response to your text input — it spits out multiple images, all different AI responses that can then be tweaked further. If you visit the DALL-E 2 website right now, you can see examples of the process in action by toggling between various descriptors that demonstrate how different inputs can generate radically diverse images, even given the same base idea, in this case a humble and potentially very boring bowl of soup.

Many more folks are experimenting with DALL-E, including W. David Marx and Roni Xu, who used DALL-E to generate imagery of the absurd cuisine from F. T. Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook; and artist Meech Boakye, who participated in DALL-E’s “Artist Onboarding Program” earlier this year, and talked to MOLD about how the software was strangely better at generating “paintings” than “photographic images” of food.

Importantly: there weren’t any scare quotes around those terms in the story.

Now, I’m not a Luddite by any means, but this is where I say a big YIKES. I told myself I was gonna focus on the fun of DALL-E in this post, but the MOLD story left me disturbed. As a curator and art historian, I’m not ready for a universe in which I might see, on Instagram or elsewhere, what I assume to be a digital photograph of a real painting, only to learn that it’s actually an AI-generated image meant to mimic the aesthetics of painting with no relation to any physical object. (Unsavvy collectors WILL be burned by this in the not-too-distant future, if they haven’t been already.) Working with undergrads who are digital natives through and through, it’s already a struggle to get them to think critically about what they see on the internet, and to exercise due diligence to make sure that what they’re seeing hasn’t been manipulated in ways that are deceitful. In the MOLD story, Boakye also makes the well-supported argument that AI-generated images tend to reinforce racial and gender biases — yet another way in which such technology will pose challenges in teaching and more broadly. (Soon available in video!)

The quality of many of the DALL-E images I’ve seen is spectacular, and it’s not a question of if but how often people will be fooled as such images circulate in greater numbers. We are going to need a new language, and robust education around it, to tease the real from the simulated, for as long as that distinction still matters.

Just One More Bite…

One of my humble food dreams came true last weekend when I finally got a taste of pawpaw, a fruit native to the U.S. that grows wildly, has a very short season in early fall, and, magically for something native to a place like Ohio, tastes tropical. I learned about pawpaws a few years ago when I was living in Cleveland, but Covid got in the way of trying them before we moved back to LA. So I was beyond jazzed to realize that I’d be visiting NE Ohio during pawpaw season, and asked friends there to keep an eye out. Thanks to Lindsay Fullerton, I got to enjoy some pawpaw in ice cream form at my favorite spot, Mason’s Creamery, where near-frozen toes (I’m a wimp after a year in SoCal) were a small price to pay for an afternoon of wish fulfillment.

If you’re in pawpaw country — which extends from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Florida panhandle — don’t sleep on them!

Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

As soon as I saw the news last month that Claes Oldenburg had died at the age of 93, I began assembling this edition of Weekly Special. Oldenburg is easily one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, not least because of how he rendered foodstuffs with wit, charm, and a distinct lack of pretension. It’s impossible to imagine the landscape of food art (or Pop art, or sculpture) without him.

I’m sad to say I didn’t know Oldenburg personally, but I got to know his work quite intimately when I was curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, home to quite a few Oldenburgs, including his very first commissioned public sculpture, a partially buried three-way plug. Whether pulling his soft toaster out of storage, installing his plaster oranges, or watching as conservators restored the shine to the giant plug’s prongs, it never failed to put a smile on my face that we were lavishing so much care and attention on such anti-monumental, tongue-in-cheek objects. Perhaps more than any other artist, Oldenburg taught me that great art doesn’t have to be serious.

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In a review of Oldenburg’s major MoMA exhibition in 2013, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote, “Pop art is basically about two things: ordinariness and eating.” In the case of Oldenburg, though, I’d argue it’s more than that: it’s about finding childlike joy and delight in all of the random bits and bobs that we encounter in daily life, and then making them even more delightful for the benefit of other people.

So with that, let’s dig in!

This Week’s Special: A Tribute to Claes Oldenburg, One of the Greatest Food-Artists of All Time, Part 1 of Several

All works below are by Claes Oldenburg unless otherwise noted.

I tried to cram all of my favorite works by Oldenburg into one issue of this newsletter, but it quickly became so unwieldy with fabulous images that I decided to make this a multi-part series, to appear over the course of the next few months (likely interspersed with issues on other subjects, including my very belated and equally impossible tribute to Wayne Thiebaud). Each issue in the series will be dedicated to one or two foodstuffs, beginning today with the humble baked potato. These aren’t Oldenburg’s most famous food sculptures, but I think they should be.

THE BAKED POTATO

The baked potato as we know it is probably an English invention, but nothing says American steakhouse dinner to me (besides a whopping porterhouse) more than a piping hot potato oozing melted butter. Over the course of his career, Oldenburg made quite a few, starting with this larger-than-life spud he created in 1963.

That first potato was done in the style of the chicken wire-and-plaster sculptures Oldenburg had made en masse for his 1961 project The Store, a zany installation in a Lower East Side storefront where Oldenburg sold his work directly to passers-by who looked long enough to realize the work wasn’t mere trash. Or, really, that it was more than just garbage: it was art mimicking the detritus of everyday life encountered on the LES, complete with AbEx drips of garish enamel straight from the paint can, a parody of Jackson Pollock that, Oldenburg once said, paradoxically brought him to a sense of authenticity. "I feel as if Pollock is sitting on my shoulder,” he admitted, “or rather crouching in my pants!"1

This was a pivotal time for Oldenburg. The Store directly preceded his first uptown gallery show, in 1962, where he debuted the “soft sculptures” sewn by his then-wife, Patty Mucha. (More on her in the next issue.) A year later, Oldenburg reprised The Store in another exhibition at Green Gallery, and then he and Mucha moved to Los Angeles in time for his first West Coast show, at Dwan Gallery, where (to bring this tale full circle) the baked potato appeared on a low pedestal in a room full of soft sculptures.

It was in LA that the plaster potato found its forever home, purchased by ad exec and collector Robert H. Halff, who later donated it to the LA County Museum of Art along with dozens of other works, including this cute little cherry pastry.

In 1965, Oldenburg made this drawing of a baked potato tossed in a corner (which looks kinda like a frazzled khachapuri?), and then a year later, immortalized baked potatoes en masse as the subject of his first “multiple” — editioned small sculptures that were much more affordable than singular artworks. The potatoes were Oldenburg’s contribution to 7 Objects in a Box, an edition that included work by Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. For the edition, Oldenburg fabricated 75 near-identical porcelain potatoes swimming in sour cream and chives, their russet jackets no longer dripping with gestural paint but instead rendered with an almost convincing verisimilitude.

Oldenburg returned to flights of fancy with his 1970 oversized potato, made out of canvas and topped with neat pats of (wooden) butter, a hard-and-soft combo he explored in other works as well (including the Oberlin toaster, which has wooden bread slices). I’m especially enamored of the zippers sewn into the exterior of this anemically beige spud, which make the term “jacket” winkingly literal.

The soft sculpture was also immortalized in this dramatic 1979 magazine ad for a show in Houston, which renders the spud a precious specimen to be preserved in a glass vitrine:

By 1970, when the soft potato debuted, Oldenburg had separated from Patty Mucha and was dating Hannah Wilke, a feminist artist who often depicted or invoked the form of labia in her sculptures. When she struggled with criticism, Oldenburg reportedly told her: “They’ll eventually accept baked potatoes, but I don’t know if they’ll ever, ever be able to accept you’re making female genitals—although visually they look very similar.”2

True and… true?

Anyway, Wilke was Oldenburg’s lover and studio assistant / documentarian during the years he was assembling his Mouse Museum, which debuted at the quinquennial exhibition documenta in 1972.3 The monumental installation is a cabinet of curiosities filled with cheap knickknacks alongside some of Oldenburg’s own artworks, all of which is displayed inside a squat structure shaped like a geometric mouse. Among the items in the museum are, of course, two lil’ porcelain baked potatoes.

Just One More Bite…

I thought about writing a recipe for a baked potato… but who wants to turn on an oven right now? So instead, I’m using this space as a way to share one more non-tuber work by Oldenburg that relates to our family’s favorite new summer hobby: making fruit popsicles.

As a way to use up the excessive quantities of strawberries and stone fruit I’ve been buying at the farmer’s market, my three-year-old son Ezra and I recently dug out our set of popsicle molds and our unread copy of People’s Pops and got to work.

Like many preschoolers, Ezra is basically a fruitatarian, so cracking open a cookbook where everything is made of fruit was a magical experience. At his insistence, we’ve made strawberry-buttermilk pops, plum pops, and cantaloupe-watermelon-yogurt pops. They’ve all been delicious, but the winner thus far is the plum, which has a deep, gorgeous purple hue and tastes through and through like summer’s juiciest stone fruit.

The recipe below, adapted from People’s Pops, is a blueprint you can use for almost any fruit-based pop, though I’ve found that some really benefit texturally from the addition of buttermilk or yogurt, which keeps the pop from becoming too icy.

Plum Popsicles

Makes 6-10 pops, depending on the size of the molds

1. Acquire 12 small or 5 large plums of any variety. If your plums are quite firm, you might want to cut them in half and roast them at 350 degrees for 20-ish minutes to soften them up. Or you can let them sit around for a few days to avoid the oven (or because you conveniently forgot about them, but hey, it all worked out!).

2. While waiting for your plums to roast or ripen, make 1 cup of simple syrup by mixing 2/3 cup water and 2/3 cup granulated sugar in a small saucepan and stirring over low heat until the sugar fully dissolves. Set aside to cool.

3. Once your plums are ready, plop them into a blender or food processor and blend until relatively smooth. (Pro tip: this task is kid-friendly and is likely to induce shrieks of delight.)

4. Add the simple syrup to the fruit purée and pulse for a few seconds to combine. You can also add just a little at a time if your fruit was especially sweet, but bear in mind that flavors dull as they freeze, so you want the mixture to wind up a teensy bit too sweet.

5. Pour the mixture into your molds, insert sticks, and freeze for at least 4 to 5 hours or overnight. Distract yourself with other snacks. Once the pops are fully frozen, you can unmold them under warm water and store in plastic bags or eat them straightaway.

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Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

America is a hot mess right now. (When is it not, you ask?) Thankfully there are kind folks out there who care about food and your inalienable rights, making it possible to eat tasty things and fight injustice at the same time. Bakers Against Racism is currently mobilizing to fundraise for reproductive rights, threats to which will disproportionately affect women of color. Peep their IG account for bake sales and other events all over the country. (Fellow Angelenos: you can buy killer baked goods and support the National Network of Abortion Funds at a bake sale planned for next Sunday, July 17, from 11 AM – 3 PM in Culver City; even more LA-based fundraisers are listed here.)

« INSERT COLLECTIVE SCREAM »

That felt good. Now on to the fun stuff: in the last issue of Weekly Special, I recapped the first half of my spring trip to New York, with food-art highlights from the New Museum, a special Basquiat exhibition, MoMA, and Printed Matter, plus a new-ish section of the newsletter (“The Sampler”) featuring fun finds from the interwebs.

In this issue, I finish where I left off, with four more days of food-art adventures in my fourth favorite city in the world. (My allegiances are to LA, Berlin, and Paris, in that order. Sorry, New York.) “The Sampler” takes a break, but in its place is a recipe for lemon olive oil cake, ideal for snacking any time of day. 🍋

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Let’s dig in!

This Week’s Special: Plush Sausage Dreams Fulfilled, and Other New York Food-Art Moments

saturday

Early bird gets a no-wait breakfast at Buvette. Espresso-machine-steamed eggs with prosciutto and a generous shower of Parmesan? YES PLEASE.

Now properly fueled, I met up with artist Daniel Giordano to see the Whitney Biennial before heading to two LES galleries showing Daniel’s sculptures. Titled Quiet As It’s Kept, the Biennial (which is up through Sept. 5) packs work by 63 artists and collectives into two floors of the museum, with a LOT of video, a curious hanging system, and, to our chagrin, basically zero food-art. (Ask me offline about the rest of the show. I have… thoughts.)

Real joy was found in the museum store, where, after years of thinking about it (no exaggeration), I finally bought one of the plush stuffed sausages they sell as a nod to the Whitney’s location in the Meatpacking District. Handmade by “imaginary grocer” Yuki & Daughters in Brooklyn, the selection includes hot dogs, kielbasa, weisswurst (be still my quarter-Bavarian heart!), kosher and hard salami, plus requisite pretzels and black and white cookies.

Daniel can attest that I spent an embarrassingly long time debating among the options before deciding on a hard salami (that twine grid was too sexy to pass up) and a black-and-white, which feels like a mini beanbag and functions as a paperweight and a stress relief tool.

Also in the store were wacky ceramic foodstuffs by Lindsey Lou Howard, whose whimsical renditions of edible Americana are having A Moment.

Three of her “Mouthful” vessels starred in a show that just closed at Hashimoto Contemporary in LA, while one of her burgers was featured in a rundown of food-themed ceramics in the June/July issue of Bon Appetit. She also recently shared a flaccid pickle handgun that is one of the best things I’ve seen on the internet, maybe ever.

Glowing from my plushie purchase, I ushered us to lunch at Balaboosta, where Daniel and I dined with one of the loveliest curators I know, Kristin Poor, whose most recent show at Princeton’s Bernstein Gallery featured a project by Wesaam Al-Badry that documents the effect of Covid-19 on farmworkers in California through photographs and hours of audio interviews.

Not unlike Narsiso Martinez’s produce-box portraits (which I wrote about here), Al-Badry’s work serves to highlight the troubling reality that “despite facing high risks of contracting the virus while working, farmworkers without legal immigration status are excluded from federal pandemic relief, paid sick leave, and unemployment programs.” This IG post from Al-Badry gives you some sense of how he brings sound and image together, giving viewers a more embodied experience of the places and people he documents. We’re at a different moment in the pandemic now, thankfully, but these workers are no better protected than they were in 2020.

From lunch, Daniel and I made our way to Zürcher Gallery, where one of his sculptures was the star (IMO) of the group show “The Agreement: Chromatic Presences,” curated by William Corwin.

Study for Brother as Cyrano de Bergerac is a gravity-defying, one-legged creature of sorts, an absolute riot of materials and textures punctuated by competing splashes of grime and otherworldly color. Here’s a representative detail, with the caveat that the work offers something totally different from every vantage point:

To “get” the work, you need to pair close looking with a close reading of the list of materials embedded in it, which include: artificial eyes, buzzard talons, cattails, ceramic, coconut coir [a fiber derived from the coconut], copper, dock foam, epoxy, food dye, frogs [yes, actual frogs], glass beads, glitter, gourd, gravel, hosiery, lucky rabbit’s feet, makeup foundation, marzipan, my hair [Daniel’s hair], nail polish, Northeastern Fast-Dry tennis court surface [Daniel was a pro tennis player], paper plates, perlite, two paintings by Daniel’s friend Peter Eide, pizzelles [real ones and fake ones], pomade, PVC primer, shellac, silicone, snowglobe, steel coat hanger, synthetic rope, Tang drink mix, tennis racquet grommets and string, thread, vinyl, and, for good measure, water chestnut.

Over the course of a few hours together, I learned that Daniel (with whom I’d only ever chatted over IG) has a magnetic intensity and excitability that mirrors the effusiveness of his approach to sculpture. His vibe is a bit zany scientist, which rhymes perfectly with the fact that he works out of his grandfather’s former garment factory, situated along the Hudson River in upstate New York. His work has the feel of wacky, nuclear detritus — it’s somehow both alive and already artifact, made of tons of things you can’t identify, glommed together into an alien form that would be right at home in the wake of apocalypse. Though more is more for Daniel, it’s also just enough: the end result isn’t an unwieldy, messy blob of stuff, it’s a relatively economical, controlled form that pulses with the energies of everything in and on it, much of which relates to Daniel’s own personal history. I’m looking forward to exploring all of that further — particularly as it pertains to the preponderance of cannolis, marzipan, and pizzelles in his work — in a future issue of Weekly Special. Stay tuned!

sunday

This was mostly a conference day for me, but I did manage to sneak away to the Noguchi Museum (where I was charmed by the marzipan fruit display in the gift shop), and to MoMA PS1, where I was less charmed by Deana Lawson’s solo show (sorrynotsorry) but fell in love with the orange olive oil cake at Mina Stone’s cafe. (You’ll find the recipe for a lemon version below.) Always a sucker for a museum store, I also bought this David Shrigley coaster that now protects my desk from the slow melt of my iced matcha lattes:

monday

The day started again with conferencing and then improved dramatically with brunch at the Neue Galerie’s Cafe Sabarsky. Delicate crepes filled with marmalade and soft-boiled eggs served in a glass always transport me straight back to Berlin, specifically to the Viennese-style coffeehouse Café Einstein, one of my favorite grad school haunts, with old-world ambiance appropriate for savoring W.G. Sebald novels.

I left Sabarsky with a bounce in my step and headed to the Jewish Museum, where the fabulous Jonas Mekas show offered a kaleidoscopic look at his inimitable career as a filmmaker obsessed with the mundanity and profundity of the everyday.

Upstairs, a very different affair awaited: an exhibition based on Edmund de Waal’s 2010 memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes, which tells the story of the Ephrussi family and their collection, much of which fell victim to the Nazis in Vienna. I don’t have the space here to do justice to the narrative or the show, which was beautiful and haunting and object-driven in a way that made my art historian skin tingle. Among many moments I enjoyed, though, was seeing a ghostly wallpaper version of Manet’s asparagus, a painting once owned by Charles Ephrussi. I was so engrossed in the exhibition (which had a perfectly calibrated GPS-enabled audioguide of de Waal reading from the memoir) that I had forgotten about Ephrussi’s history with the asparagus, which was the subject of the second issue of Weekly Special, along with its single-spear pendant painting.

Heart full from really good exhibitions (it’s rare to love two back-to-back!), I snagged a bagel-and-lox ornament in the museum store and then experienced emotional whiplash as I realized that the Russ & Daughters cafe in the basement had permanently closed, depriving me of quick access to the best bagels, lox, latkes, and babka in the city, in the place where they make the most sense. Alas, if you’re in New York, you can still get your fix on the LES, and if you’re elsewhere, you can order a feast through Goldbelly. It’s worth every penny.

tuesday

With just six hours to spare before boarding a flight home to LA, I visited one of my favorite collectors, Peter Cohen, who has assembled a mind-blowing treasure trove of more than 60,000 vernacular photographs — a collection constantly in flux as Peter continues to acquire more and more (from other collectors, estate sales, eBay, dealers, etc.) while also donating curated selections to museums across the country. For those not familiar with the lingo: vernacular photos are “non-art” images taken by amateurs or in commercial studios, usually accompanied by little or no information about their makers or subjects. For a long time museums have treated such images as unimportant, but they’ve come around in recent years (in part due to Peter’s tireless lobbying) to understand what should be obvious: that the photos ordinary people take and keep offer valuable insight into who we are, how we live, and what we hold dear. That, and ordinary people take some damn fine photos, deserving of care, preservation, and exhibition.

I was visiting Peter to search for material for a future show, but he also shared a few new gems, including this lovingly assembled scrapbook that pays tribute to the one and only Shirley Temple.

After a few hours of photo immersion (and some very good croissants), I sped uptown to meet a friend at the Met, mostly to catch up but also to see the Afrofuturist period room and to run through the Winslow Homer show. Among the shipwrecks and seascapes was this lovely painting of oranges on a branch in the Bahamas, which closed out my trip and now offers the perfect segue to this week’s final bite.

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Just One More Bite…

If you made it this far into the newsletter, thanks for being a friend.

Your reward is this very easy, very delicious recipe for lemon olive oil cake, from Mina Stone’s latest book, aptly titled Lemon, Love & Olive Oil. I previously repped the book in an art cookbook feature for the excellent newsletter Stained Page News, but this was the first time I’d baked anything from it. The orange version I had at Stone’s cafe in New York was also perfect, but I’m partial to the tartness of lemons, I’ve realized. This cake plays quite nicely with ice cream, whipped cream, and/or whatever other fruit you have on hand as garnish. There’s also zero shame in eating it for breakfast with a big dollop of Greek yogurt, or all by itself, any time of day.

Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Good morning, especially to all of you new subscribers! I’ve been super thrilled to see a parade of sign-ups in recent weeks, and if someone is responsible for spreading the gospel of Weekly Special, I would really love to thank them (and return the favor, if I can). If you signed up recently, I’d be endlessly grateful if you could hit reply on this email to share with me how you heard about WS. Either way, I’m so glad you’re here.

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I recently spent a whirlwind six days in New York, attending the annual conference of the Association of Art Museum Curators and, more importantly, consuming as much art (and food) as possible to tide myself over until my next trip. There are simply TOO MANY bites and images and anecdotes I want to share, so I’m splitting this travelogue over two issues for double the fun.

Let’s dig in!

This Week’s Special: Biting Into the Big Apple, Part 1

thursday

I landed in New York on a chilly evening, glad I remembered to dig out a wool coat before I left LA. I bounded from baggage claim to a taxi stand and went straight to the New Museum, where I knew from past experience I could stash my giant suitcase without hassle. The Faith Ringgold retrospective was 1000% worth the rush from the airport, comprising three floors of paintings, quilts, and sculptures, some familiar, many new to me. I wasn’t expecting any food content, so I was surprised to find a series of very intimate quilts I had never seen before, documenting Ringgold’s lifelong struggle with overeating and undesired weight gain.

The first quilt begins with a declaration:

January 1, 1986. In this year, 1986, I will lose 128 pounds. By January 1, 1987 I will weigh 130 pounds, or I’ll eat your hat. Mine I’ve already eaten. Faith you have been trying to lose weight since the sixties. For the last twenty, twenty-five years you’ve been putting yourself on diets, charting your lack of progress and gaining weight. For the next six months you’ll be in California, away from every body, the perfect place to make the CHANGE.

Addressing herself with endearing self-deprecating humor, Ringgold goes on to recount her love of pork chops and ribs, her discovery of the glories of wine and cheese in France, and her failed experiment with diet pills — decades of her life distilled into eight panels of handwritten text interspersed with black and white photographs etched into the fabric. Her accomplishments as an artist and mother take a backseat to the main narrative about weight loss and gain, which is ultimately a story about how self-talk can be both damaging and healing.

What began as a one-off quilt about weight loss developed into a series of three, as the second quilt (shown below) explains at the start: “In 1986 I lost 100 pounds. In 1988 I gained it all back. No! In 1988 I continue to pursue my goal to lose an additional 30 pounds.”

The quilt’s central image is a self-portrait of a thin, bathing suit-clad Ringgold, with the shadow of her larger self looming in the background. She’s surrounded by text panels recording a litany of songs with titles such as, “Mama Made Me Do It,” “I Hate Exercise,” and “Greasy Food.” Now that I’ve crossed over into my late 30s, I most relate to “Pain”:

Pain © 1988. Pain, pain pa-a-a-a-in / I feel a pain in my knee / So bad I can’t see / Make me hobble around / And twist my hip / I’m sorry I ate those chips / I feel a pain in my back / Feel like it could crack / Make me holler and scream / Stay away from that ice cream / I feel a pain in my leg / Like I’m pullin a keg / Can’t get up those stairs / Stop eatin chocolate eclairs / Will this end? / Yes / When? / Now / How? / Move around shake your body / Make a sound make it hearty / Walk a mile and you’ll smile / You’ll feel good, You’ll feel great / You’ll lose that weight (Repeat 3x’s) / Oh yea 

The final quilt in the series, completed three years later in 1991, feels like a coda. Ringgold imagines she’s having a party where “everyone invited is a manifestation of yourself.” “Would you want to be surrounded by yourself,” Ringgold asks rhetorically, “the you who are your repressed dreams and fantasies; your second helpings, midnight binges and lack-luster lazy, cookie-monster demons?” She plays out the thought experiment, enumerating past versions of herself in a numbered list. She ends on these contrasting visions:

19. There is one woman who is my greatest fantasy, though she will never be invited again. I identify with her too closely. She eats nonstop and never gains weight. 

20. There are two very large women who have eaten three trays of hors d’oeuvres each before dinner. They have invited me to an after dinner party for coffee, cake, and ice cream. Really! 

Reading these quilts with rapt attention in a room full of strangers felt voyeuristic, but I nevertheless appreciated the rawness and honesty of Ringgold’s struggles with weight, and the fact that she allowed herself to focus this series squarely on her own journey given that so much of her oeuvre reflects on major figures and events in Black American history. Of course, what’s intensely personal is also universal. There’s a lot that’s familiar about Ringgold’s relationship with food, and the deeply embedded cultural scripts around indulgence and self-control that she knows are mere constructs but still hold power over her. The Change series offered Ringgold a space to contend with her own contradictions — not to resolve them, but to catalogue them, map them out, and wrest back a sense of control.

Back on the ground floor of the museum, I had a very different aesthetic experience awaiting me: a beautifully alive solo show by Daniel Lie, titled Unnamed Entities. Stretching the length of the gallery, the installation consisted of various pots and draped fabrics suffused with soil, flowers, rice, sugar, water, oyster mushroom spawn, line seeds, turmeric, and “unnamed entities” — microorganisms and other stealth bits of nature that lurk everywhere, impacting our environment (and indeed all works of art) in ways we rarely notice. Lie assembles materials and then lets organic processes take over, “working in collaboration with forces they term ‘other-than-human beings,’ such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors.” Signs of life in the installation wax and wane; I saw desiccated mushrooms that had sprouted and then withered, leaving a faint scent in the air and no doubt tons of invisible spores. Lie’s work contrasted sharply with the cold concrete and glass of the gallery space, but that bit of wildness got me thinking about how much nature lurks in and around the urban landscape, flowering and decomposing in an endless cycle.

friday

First up: the much-lauded Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition organized by his family, which has managed his estate since his death in 1988. I was vaguely skeptical about the whole enterprise (not least because tickets cost $35), but King Pleasure had some of the most gorgeous exhibition design I’ve ever seen, with moody walnut panelling creating a sense of warmth and gravitas unmatched by the stereotypical white cube. The show had something for everyone across the breadth of Basquiat’s oeuvre, with a killer soundtrack of ‘80s dance beats wafting through the space. Food doesn’t present with great frequency in Basquiat’s paintings, but it popped up a few times in the show, most remarkably in an undated notebook covered in the artist’s signature all-caps scrawl. The notebook was open to a page where Basquiat seemed to be processing one of his many trips to Hawaii, trips that featured guavas, roasted pigs, bad luaus, helicopter flights, and an exchange of racial slurs.

I left with the feeling that Basquiat’s oeuvre is remarkable above all else for its capaciousness — for its ability to absorb joy and pain, history and mundane bits of daily life, all on a single sheet of paper or length of canvas. As with Ringgold’s work, there’s no resolution here, just unassimilable contradiction and complexity.

With Donna Summer’s “Sunset People” ringing in my ears, I made my semi-annual pit stop at Printed Matter, a long established mecca for obscure and marginal books, zines, and posters. I set out to find some food-art volumes I didn’t already have, and 30 minutes later, gleefully bought a handful of artist books, including The Chute Family Cookbook, a quasi-chronicle of the pandemic cooking habits of studio mates Amy Burek and Zach Clark. The riso-printed double-sided book features recipes by Burek on one side, accompanied by her own illustrations, and recipes by Clark on the other, paired with reproductions of tiny sculptures by Rebecca Ackermann. This lil’ cutie, for example, illustrates a recipe for jammy peppers:

Properly loaded down with the morning’s purchases, I hopped on the subway to MoMA to see Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound, curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with help from my Williams classmate Erica DiBenedetto. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Alphabet Bété, an illustrated alphabet the artist invented for the Bété people, an ethnic group in present-day Côte d’Ivoire to which he belonged. But the gem, for me, was a series titled Readings from Signs Observed on Oranges, a set of 86 drawings in pen and colored pencil on cardboard. Bouabré studied “the patterns and chance markings on the fruit” in order to “[divine] abstract scripts as well as human, animal, and mythical figures.” The result is a wide range of abstract images drawn within the shape of a circle, resembling biological matter seen through the lens of a microscope. I love the impulse to see meaning in everything, even in the craggy landscape of something you might otherwise discard without a thought.

The second half of the New York travelogue, with appearances by Daniel Giordano, David Shrigley, and Manet’s asparagus, will hit your inbox in the coming weeks. Don’t miss it!

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The Sampler

A little bit of everything, perfect for nibbling (or half-awake scrolling).

👩‍🍳 Craft, Cooking, Performance

On Wednesday, June 15, the Haystack Mountain School of Craft is hosting what sounds like a fabulous virtual event: “To mark the release of the 2021 Haystack Monograph, New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance, Sara Clugage and Jenni Sorkin will be in conversation about the place of cooking in craft history—in the kitchen, the studio, and on television. The conversation will be introduced and moderated by Sarah K. Khan.” Register here!

🍜 Cup o’ Noodle Caboodle

Nothing says grad school all-nighter faster than a sweaty styrofoam vessel of beef-flavored CUP NOODLES™, dressed up with a handful of spinach and a squiggle of sriracha. That was my go-to in moments of desperation, when I hit a wall writing a seminar paper and needed ramen-fuel to power through just a bit more Derrida, which I knew held the secrets to whatever conundrum I was facing. (Spoiler alert: Derrida was never the answer.) Apropos of nothing (just like this intro, really), there’s now a makeup kit inspired by CUP NOODLES™, with earthy shades such as “Diced Carrot,” “Hot & Spicy,” and “Seasoning.” I haven’t tried it on my own face, but just seeing the logo on the website made me hungry and anxious about critical theory… so there’s that.

☕️ Obscure Muybridge via Artle

Since Artle debuted, it’s entered into my morning rotation of phone games, right alongside Wordle and the NYT Spelling Bee. Each day is dedicated to a single mystery artist, and the program reveals four works of art, one at a time, to give you plenty of chances to ID the artist correctly. The order moves from most obscure to most recognizable, so the first image or two is almost always one you wouldn’t expect. Here’s the surprising first clue that appeared for the photographer Eadward Muybridge, of running horse fame, who also apparently took stunning photos of coffee plantations:

Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!

Often I write the intro to this newsletter in a place very different (literally and figuratively) from wherever I wrote the rest of the issue. Case in point: I’m writing these words from a hotel room in New York, where I’m attending the annual art museum curator conference and running around trying to see and eat ALL.THE.THINGS. (Standouts so far: the gorgeously designed Basquiat show organized by his family and the sizzling lamb belly at Đi Ăn Đi.) The rest of the newsletter, by contrast, was written mostly in LA from my favorite table at Go Get ‘Em Tiger, the coffee shop I frequent every Sunday morning to squeeze in some writing before the farmers market. I sit outside with a plate of soft-scrambled eggs and avocado and peck at my keyboard while I watch a steady stream of millennials amble past with squirmy babies and bags of organic produce.

I like my routines, but I also really like mixing it up, and that’s exactly what I’m doing with Weekly Special, starting with this issue. I’m experimenting with different ways of organizing content and sharing more of the food-art morsels I’ve been collecting. My goal is to be able to publish more often so I don’t have to rename this newsletter “Monthly Special,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Anyway, I hope you like what I’ve plated up! If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. You can write it in a comment or hit reply to send it to me directly.

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Before we dig in, a quick heads-up that the first section of this issue, on weavings by Diedrick Brackens, contains mentions of drowning and police violence. Skip to the next section (“The Sampler”) if that’s not something you want to read right now.

This Week’s Special: Diedrick Brackens @ Craft Contemporary

Diedrick Brackens’ current solo show, heaven is a muddy riverbed, is a slow-burning revelation. Tucked into a low-ceilinged gallery at Craft Contemporary, the exhibition features a series of Brackens’ weavings and several of his poems, all revolving around the image of the catfish. When you enter, the first work you encounter is all caught up and flow (2018), a small weaving of a catfish curled on a dinner plate, fork and knife set and ready. Teal, lilac, navy, and electric yellow dominate, suggesting murky water and moss-covered stones, linking the catfish on the plate to the river where it once swam.

As the wall text and poems make explicit, Brackens’ catfish series alludes to the drowning of three young Black men — Steven Booker, Carl Baker, and Anthony Freeman — in Lake Mexia, Texas, in 1981. In the middle of Mexia’s legendary annual Juneteenth celebration, the three men had been taken into police custody for marijuana possession and loaded, in the dark of night, onto a boat that couldn’t hold their weight. When the boat capsized, all three officers made it to safety while Booker, Baker, and Freeman (two of whom were excellent swimmers) did not.

A court of inquiry was opened, with conflicting testimony about whether the men had been handcuffed when they boarded the boat. The lawyer leading the inquest determined that the officers had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence” but lacked racist intent. A jury later found the officers not guilty of criminal negligence and all walked free, an outcome that traumatized the entire community all over again.

Brackens was born in Mexia eight years later. His weavings function as a memorial to Booker, Baker, and Freeman — the only memorial, that is, as nothing has ever been erected for them in Mexia, though the town’s 2021 Juneteenth celebration (much diminished from its former glory) honored their memory.

This memorial is a fitting one, quiet in some places and bold in others, rendered in textile — a medium far more precarious than bronze or marble. Brackens represents human and fish forms in stark black silhouettes reminiscent of Matisse’s dancers, giving them an allegorical charge. That charge grows stronger and more pointed when one considers the work is primarily made of hand-dyed cotton, a material inextricably bound to the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the American South.

Brackens’ poems underscore the meditative and spiritual quality of his weavings. In “they have grown gills,” a poem dedicated to Booker, Baker, and Freeman, the narrator lies down in the dried bed of a lake. “the fish return to me first,” they say, and soon, “the catfish, sacred here, multiply in lake me. / the whiskered faithful sing in a one word language. / water, womb, god, gather, breathe, brother, / hunt and heartbeat are all the same.” The lake bears the memory of the past, offering it up to anyone willing to sit in silence long enough for the spirits to speak. The poem ends with these lines, which aptly describe the world Brackens conjures in his textiles:

sometimes, i dream of boys. they fall
and flap, breaking open my glassy eye.
they dance down, deep into my belly
where i can’t cry them out. i try
and fill their chests with, "breathe! god! brother!"
i don’t know the words for save or swim.
my catfish wreathe them—suits of clouds.

In the catalogue that accompanies the show, TK Smith writes, “The catfish as chosen symbol opens the imaginative space to conceive of an ancient relational kinship between Black people and the catfish. As Black people migrate and are displaced across the world, they can maintain the relationship to their ancestors simply by casting a line.”

Casting a line is ultimately a way of catching a meal, one indelibly associated with Black life in the American South. What does it mean to ingest, to bring into one’s body, the flesh of a creature that functions as a symbol of diasporic kinship and, in the case of Brackens’ poems, also as an avatar for the restless spirits of the dead? Consuming something is a form of intimacy and closeness; it becomes a part of you, inextricable. There are deep religious connections here — Holy Communion, for one, which Catholics believe becomes the literal body and blood of Christ. Other religions involve similar forms of communing through consuming: Kamaleeh Janan Rasheed has written, for example, about the practice of drinking the ink used to write verses from the Qur’an, while many other traditions rely on the ingestion of potions and elixirs to produce states of awareness, enlightenment, or possession.

Possession is indeed what Brackens describes in both his poems and his weavings. His catfish dance deep into the bellies of his human subjects, possessing them in ways that console and unsettle.

heaven is a muddy riverbed was on view at Craft Contemporary (5814 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles) from Jan. 30 – May 8, 2022.

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The Sampler

This new section of the newsletter is like a mini-version of past Smörgåsbord issues: a little bit of everything, perfect for nibbling (or half-awake scrolling).

🍇 OLD FRUIT PICTURES

A digital humanities project I can get behind: a Twitter account run by a bot that puts out images from the pomological watercolor collection in the USDA’s agricultural library. (h/t the Good Food newsletter, source of so many good things indeed)

🍏 SAM VAN AKEN’S OPEN ORCHARD

In more fruit news, artist Sam Van Aken has embarked on an ambitious crowd-funded project to create a pub­lic orchard on Governors Island com­prised of 102 hybrid fruit trees. According to Governors Island Arts, “The Open Orchard will act as a liv­ing archive for antique and heir­loom fruit vari­eties that were grown in and around New York City in the past 400 years but have most­ly dis­ap­peared due to cli­mate change and the indus­tri­al­iza­tion of agriculture.” For a very charming, very New Yorker take, enjoy this profile of Van Aken, complete with outfit descriptions and light-hearted sarcasm.

🍣 JAPANESE PLASTIC FANTASTIC

When I first visited Japan in 2006, I was super excited to make a stop on Tokyo’s Kappabashi Dogugai Street, where numerous shops sell Sampuru, the plastic food nearly ubiquitous in restaurant displays all over Tokyo and beyond. I bought just a few modest creations — a tamago magnet and an ikura keychain, if memory serves — but spent hours examining elaborate lifelike recreations of ramen, curry, and unagi over rice, not to mention every imaginable variation on the ice cream sundae. If a trip to Japan is not on the horizon, you can get your fill of Sampuru courtesy of the New York Times, with text by Tejal Rao and sumptuous photos by Kyoko Hamada.

🍰 BUT IS IT CAKE?

Speaking of fakery as high art… If you haven’t already blazed through the Netflix reality competition show Is It Cake?, I don’t know what you’ve been doing with your life. (More important things, you say? Pssshh.) The show is everyone’s favorite TikTok / Instagram Reels phenom stretched into eight episodes of trompe l’oeil jaw-droppers, some more convincing than others. Turns out there’s very little that fondant, edible spray paint, and stage lighting can’t mimic, which is both awesome and terrifying.

😜 SCHOLAR PAUL GEARY ON EXPERIMENTAL DINING

Theatricality is in the air, apparently, because no sooner had I finished Is it Cake? than my phone announced the arrival of the latest New Books in Art podcast: a conversation with performance scholar Paul Geary, author of the new book Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants. It’s as heady as it sounds, but — having eaten some mind-blowing avant-garde meals myself — I found Geary’s analysis of the techniques and presentation of today’s haute cuisine to be quite insightful. Also: major props to anyone who builds a book project around once-in-a-lifetime meals. Just look at this gorgeousness from Alinea:

Just One More Bite…

My cooking escapades of late have been rather boring, so I’m leaving you with a tasty preview of the next issue, which will be a quick-and-dirty rundown of all the food-art I saw (and some of the food I ate) on my recent whirlwind trip to New York.

Despite having spent many weeks and months in New York over the past two decades, I had never been to the Noguchi Museum and finally took a free hour to correct that unbelievable wrong.

After ogling loads of gorgeous carved stone sculptures and taking an embarrassing number of selfies in the garden, I ambled into the museum shop and found, amidst shelves of beautiful light fixtures I can’t afford, a little display of marzipan fruit, hand-crafted at Fortunato Brothers in Brooklyn.

The display was accompanied by a series of notes nodding to Noguchi’s interest in an expanded notion of sculpture, and to the origins of marzipan as a trompe l’oeil gambit expertly played by a group of nuns. Marzipan as sculpture also reminded me of Daniel Giordano’s marzipan workshops… but I’ll save my lovely meet-up with Daniel for the next issue. For now, feast your eyes on these sweet strawberries I haven’t yet had the heart to eat.

Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.

Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!