Plush Sausage Dreams Fulfilled
The second half of my New York recap, complete with pizzelle-encrusted sculptures, bagel-and-lox ornaments, and yes, plush sausages. And a bonus recipe for olive oil lemon cake!
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
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.)
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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. 🍋
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.
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.
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Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!
This issue was pure delight!
Sounds like a perfect NYC trip. I was dying to see that amazing double feature at the JM, can’t get enough of their worlds…