Food for Thought Exhibition in Southern California

Anne Hamersky on location at Native Seeds/SEARCH in Arizona

Check out this exhibit featuring photographs from Farm Together Now by Anne Hamersky along with some other great food-related art projects at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA

Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption

Featuring: Edith Abeyta, Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young), Anne Hamersky, Lauren Kasmer, Mark Menjivar, and Jessica Rath

Curated by Rebecca Trawick

January 17- March 24 Reception for the artists: January 18, 6-8pm In Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption, artists Edith Abeyta, Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young), Anne Hamersky, Lauren Kasmer, Mark Menjivar, and Jessica Rath use food as the impetus to explore food politics and activism in complex ways.

LA-based Edith Abeyta is a visual/performance artist, writer and curator who mines our culture’s fraught relationship with The Black Panther Party in her performative, Panther Lunch Club. A multifaceted installation of outreach, education, and social engagement, the Panther Lunch Club positions artist, Edith Abeyta in the roles of activist and organizer. Inspired by The Black Panther Party’s Service to the People Programs, Abeyta posits that the government has continued to fail us and that we must work cooperatively to change and empower our daily lives when it comes to everyday necessities such as food. Instituting a weekly lunch program in the patio of the museum, Abeyta co-hosts an open free meal with artists, activists, scholars, and representatives from government agencies to discuss the practicalities, politics, access, and solutions to our current food crisis.

Fallen Fruit is an ongoing art collaboration that began with creating maps of the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities. Their participatory projects have expanded to include Public Fruit Jams in which they invite citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Public Fruit Tree Adoptions that invite the public to plant trees on the margins of private property. Fallen Fruit’s visual images include an ongoing series of narrative photographs, installations and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. The three artists of Fallen Fruit, David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young, think of fruit as the lens by which they look at the world.

Focusing on the farmers who are committed to alternative food systems, Anne Hamersky’s photographs give us access to the farmers who are fighting to maintain small, sustainable agricultural models throughout the United States. The work in Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption comes from a 2009 cross-country trip with San Francisco-based artist Amy Franceshini and Chicago-based documentarian Daniel Tucker. The result of their trip is the compendium Farm Together Now, a book celebrating America’s agricultural revival.

Lauren Kasmer uses textile design, public participatory performances, peoples own recipes and stories about food to investigate our relationship with food and consumption. Kasmer is creating a series of public events and food fete’s to engage us as a community with her installation Thoughtful Food.

Photographer Mark Menjivar explores the interiors of people’s refrigerators in his series You Are What You Eat. Menjivar uses the personal landscape of one’s refrigerator to provide a space to think about what we consume and what those choices mean for us personally and as a society. Menjivar is a Texas-based artist who spent over three years traveling the United States taking photos of diverse Americans and their food.

LA-based Jessica Rath was directly inspired by Pollan’s book and after reading it launched a many-year project that eventually led her to the USDA/Cornell University Plant Genetics Resource Unit where she worked to document the various apple forms and colors found in nature. She’s created a series of porcelain rare apples where she stayed focused on representing their individual types, and a series of large-format photographs of the trees of the USDA/Cornell University Plant Genetics Resource Unit. Raths succeeds in creating scientific portraits and works of art simultaneously in her highly poetic and thought-provoking work.

Visit our website for additional programming to be announced including artist talks, workshops and performances: http://www.chaffey.edu/wignall