Melted Pots & Cooked Books

About

We all come from somewhere else, and bring with us memories, recipes and comfort in edible form. As these recipes travel, they also change and adapt to local products and available cooking methods. “American Cuisine” is a crucible of admixed cultures, histories, cuisines, spices and traditions.  Melted Pots and Cooked Books is the fall/winter exhibit at the Institute Library focusing on our collective shifting and intersecting food experiences. Our celebrations are enactments of old traditions, blended with new innovations, contemporary preferences and often necessary modifications and modernizations. This project interacts with those from both oral and written traditions and seeks to engage all the senses by including sound, scent, and taste into the traditional word and image setting of the art gallery.   
 
Melted Pots and Cooked Books also goes outside of the traditional gallery format in that it includes domestic items and objects not commonly demarcated as “art”, and will highlight the cultural importance and relevance of such things as family recipes and tools as “art” by displaying them with aesthetic care and respect.  The exhibit will also include relevant books to provide a historical grounding to the show and connect past views of “American Cuisine” with how we presently define ourselves.   
 
Melted Pots and Cooked Books posits that breaking bread together is interactive art in one of its most immediate and profound manifestations, and something that we all participate in. Sharing food with others is a universal act of generosity which allows cross-cultural conversations to start, stories to flow, memories and personages to come alive in the moment. The exhibit aims to access and examine this collective social mechanism through the gallery exhibit and related events including tastings, gatherings and readings.