UNITED STATES / CHICAGO: FEAST: RADICAL HOSPITALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

until Sunday June 10 2012
Smart Museum of Art
The University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
60637 Chicago
United States

Press contact
C.J. Lind
T : +1 773 702 0176.
cjlind@uchicago.edu
www.smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

From the 1930 “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking” to a new food truck serving Iraqi cuisine on the streets of Chicago, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art surveys the history of the artist-orchestrated meal in the exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art.

The exhibition serves up the work of more than thirty artists and artists groups who have transformed the simple act of sharing food and drink with others into a radical form of hospitality that punctures everyday experience. “Eating together is a basic element of human culture,” said Stephanie Smith, the exhibition’s organizer and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. “But it wasn’t until the last few decades that artists began to experiment with the aesthetic potential of the shared meal itself and craft provocative, meal-based projects that foster critical engagement with the world around us.”

Feast, the first exhibition of its kind, surveys the emergence of the artist-orchestrated meal, assessing its roots in early-twentieth century European avant-garde art, its development over the past decades within Western art, and its current global ubiquity. The exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to some of the most influential artists of recent history—from the Italian Futurists and Gordon Matta-Clark to Marina Abramovic and Rirkrit Tiravanija. It also will present new and restaged projects that will allow the public to experience first hand the ways in which artists are using the meal as a catalyst for artistic expression.