The Kitchen Is Now Open
On view August 12 through October 18, 2019

Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center
2nd floor, Alfred R. Goldstein Library

The possibilities surrounding food preparation and the dining table have long been a subject of interest to artists—from Alison Knowles’s Fluxus proposition “Make a salad” (1962) and its subsequent performances and Michael Rakowitz’s socially-engaged Enemy Kitchen (2003-ongoing) that teaches Americans how to make Iraqi food to Judy Chicago’s feminist-intervention-installation The Dinner Party (1979) and Joseph Grigely’s Untitled Conversation at the Potato Cafe (1996), a tableau of remnants from a meal shared between dining companions.

The Kitchen Is Now Open takes a small shift from this trajectory to specifically look at the legacy of the cookbook as an expressive genre and the forms it has taken in the hands of modern and contemporary artists. The exhibition contains a selection of artists’ cookbooks, recipes, and food scores from 1945–2019. Readers will find recipe ideas—practical, delicious, humorous, pointed—for every course. 

Some projects approach cooking and art making as an act of radical hospitality, others draw attention to the hidden creativity of domestic labor, others share their embodied joy of eating. Themes include: At the Genetically Modified Table; Chewing on Globalization; The Memory of Dinners Past; The Art of Food Illustration; A Recipe of Romance & Heartache; Second Wave Feminism and the Terrain of the Kitchen; The Artwork Is and Is Not Really About the Food; Artists and Writers, Combine and Stir.

This exhibition will be traveling to the Venice Public Library Dec. 3-30, 2019.

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The Center also releases its seventh title in the Exhibition Takeaways series: Process-ing History: The Photobook and the Archive. Available as a Riso-printed booklet and a digital download.