Tuesday May 8, 2012

Rooted: food and farming initiatives as regional artworks

7-9 PM

To conclude the Of Other Chicagos SALON series, we will examine ways that innovative agricultural and culinary projects assert new understandings of spaces, ideals, tools, and relationships. Food is a common language with which we can talk about topics such as sustainability, local economies, nutrition, access, with many different types of people. These creative initiatives are about the pleasures of food, understanding diverse histories of cuisine, and bringing people together around a table to discuss the issues that are important to their lives in Chicago and elsewhere.  

threewalls hosts a variety of public programs aimed at engaging audiences in a conversations about the visual arts. The salon program is an open, topical conversation, where the public is invited to participate in a moderated conversation around current issues in contemporary art practice. SALONS invite a group of respondents to be on hand and part of the discussion, but everyone is welcome to come and be apart of the dialog. The SALON 2012 series Of Other Chicagos also highlights Propeller Fund awardees and other artists and creative thinkers who work in the public realm.

More information on the entire series here
Image: Eric May's E-Dogz Mobile Culinary Community Center

Participants:

Martha Bayne is a writer and editor based in Chicago whose work orbits loosely around food and community. Her features and essays have appeared in Time Out Chicago, The Washington Post, The Baffler, and the Chicago Reader, where she was on staff for ten years. She is also the author of Soup & Bread Cookbook: Building Community One Pot at a Time (2011), a cookbook and social history of soup inspired by Soup & Bread, a community soup dinner and hunger relief fundraiser she launched in 2009 at the Hideout, a bar and music club on the city's north side.

Eric May is a Chicago born and based artist, chef, and educator. His range of practices, at its core, investigates and intervenes in ecologies, not only biological, but also social. He has been cooking for the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist's Residency since 2000. He opened Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago's Noble Square neighborhood in 2006 and continues to direct its program. In the spring of 2011 he launched E-Dogz Mobile Culinary Community Center, a collaborative kitchen on wheels aiming to bring mongrel cuisines to the streets of Chicago. During his downtime he loves the outdoors and especially foraging for mushrooms.

Andi Sutton is an artist whose practice explores the ways that performance art methodology can create new models for community development and social engagement.  Working in a solo and collective context, her projects incorporate food, agriculture, television and street intervention, video, performance, and installation. She produces work in a solo and collaborative context.  As core member of the leadership team of The National Bitter Melon Council, she and the NBMC have developed Bitter Melon-focused works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (Los Angeles, CA, USA), The Western Front (Vancouver, BC, Canada), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco,CA, USA),the SMART Museum (Chicago, IL, USA), among others as well as at CSA farms, on restaurant tables, on brave tongues and inside hungry bellies. 

Fereshteh Toosi is a multidisciplinary artist who collects and recombines sounds, words, images, and actions. Through a participatory social practice she creatively explores social geography, sensory ethnography, sustainability, and migration issues. When she's not riding a bicycle, Fereshteh grows vegetables in the empty lot behind her house, counts macroinvertebrates in the Chicago River, and volunteers as a beekeeper at Garfield Park Conservatory. Currently a research fellow at Archeworks, Fereshteh's Propeller Fund project GARLIC & GREENS connects vegetable gardening to soul food traditions. http://fereshteh.net

Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.