Biting Into the Big Apple
Food-art highlights from my recent trip to New York, including Faith Ringgold's quilts, fungi (they're everywhere!), and exquisite drawings of orange peels đ
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Good morning, especially to all of you new subscribers! Iâve 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, Iâd be endlessly grateful if you could hit reply on this email to share with me how you heard about WS. Either way, Iâm so glad youâre here.
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 Iâm splitting this travelogue over two issues for double the fun.
Letâs dig in!
This Weekâs 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 wasnât expecting any food content, so I was surprised to find a series of very intimate quilts I had never seen before, documenting Ringgoldâs 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 Iâll eat your hat. Mine Iâve already eaten. Faith you have been trying to lose weight since the sixties. For the last twenty, twenty-five years youâve been putting yourself on diets, charting your lack of progress and gaining weight. For the next six months youâll 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 â 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: âIn 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.â
The quiltâs central image is a self-portrait of a thin, bathing suit-clad Ringgold, with the shadow of her larger self looming in the background. Sheâs surrounded by text panels recording a litany of songs with titles such as, âMama Made Me Do It,â âI Hate Exercise,â and âGreasy Food.â Now that Iâve crossed over into my late 30s, I most relate to âPainâ:
Pain © 1988. Pain, pain pa-a-a-a-in / I feel a pain in my knee / So bad I canât see / Make me hobble around / And twist my hip / Iâm 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 Iâm pullin a keg / Canât 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 youâll smile / Youâll feel good, Youâll feel great / Youâll lose that weight (Repeat 3xâs) / Oh yeaÂ
The final quilt in the series, completed three years later in 1991, feels like a coda. Ringgold imagines sheâs having a party where âeveryone invited is a manifestation of yourself.â âWould you want to be surrounded by yourself,â Ringgold asks rhetorically, âthe you who are your repressed dreams and fantasies; your second helpings, midnight binges and lack-luster lazy, cookie-monster demons?â 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.Â
20. There are two very large women who have eaten three trays of hors dâoeuvres each before dinner. They have invited me to an after dinner party for coffee, cake, and ice cream. Really!Â
Reading these quilts with rapt attention in a room full of strangers felt voyeuristic, but I nevertheless appreciated the rawness and honesty of Ringgoldâs 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, whatâs intensely personal is also universal. Thereâs a lot thatâs familiar about Ringgoldâs 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 â 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 âunnamed entitiesâ â 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, âworking in collaboration with forces they term âother-than-human beings,â such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors.â 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. Lieâs 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 Iâve 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 Basquiatâs oeuvre, with a killer soundtrack of â80s dance beats wafting through the space. Food doesnât present with great frequency in Basquiatâs paintings, but it popped up a few times in the show, most remarkably in an undated notebook covered in the artistâs 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 Basquiatâs oeuvre is remarkable above all else for its capaciousness â 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 Ringgoldâs work, thereâs no resolution here, just unassimilable contradiction and complexity.
With Donna Summerâs âSunset Peopleâ 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 didnât 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 lilâ cutie, for example, illustrates a recipe for jammy peppers:
Properly loaded down with the morningâs purchases, I hopped on the subway to MoMA to see FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bruly BouabrĂ©: World Unbound, curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with help from my Williams classmate Erica DiBenedetto. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Alphabet BĂ©tĂ©, an illustrated alphabet the artist invented for the BĂ©tĂ© people, an ethnic group in present-day CĂŽte dâIvoire 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. BouabrĂ© studied âthe patterns and chance markings on the fruitâ in order to â[divine] abstract scripts as well as human, animal, and mythical figures.â 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 Manetâs asparagus, will hit your inbox in the coming weeks. Donât miss it!
The Sampler
A little bit of everything, perfect for nibbling (or half-awake scrolling).
đ©âđł Craft, Cooking, Performance
On Wednesday, June 15, the Haystack Mountain School of Craft is hosting what sounds like a fabulous virtual event: âTo 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 historyâin the kitchen, the studio, and on television. The conversation will be introduced and moderated by Sarah K. Khan.â Register here!
Nothing says grad school all-nighter faster than a sweaty styrofoam vessel of beef-flavored CUP NOODLESâą, 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), thereâs now a makeup kit inspired by CUP NOODLESâą, with earthy shades such as âDiced Carrot,â âHot & Spicy,â and âSeasoning.â I havenât tried it on my own face, but just seeing the logo on the website made me hungry and anxious about critical theory⊠so thereâs that.
âïž Obscure Muybridge via Artle
Since Artle debuted, itâs 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 wouldnât expect. Hereâs the surprising first clue that appeared for the photographer Eadward Muybridge, of running horse fame, who also apparently took stunning photos of coffee plantations:
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