EXPERIENCE BUFFALOS’ MIGRATION HISTORY THROUGH A SERIES OF THREE DINNERS
Click above to read Claire Schneider's essay in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer, Second Edition. Bloomsbury Academic Publication from the Sensory Formation Series.
Buffalo, NY - Bringing together a conceptual, interactive artist, an inventive chef, and the CSA food subscription model, Eat Your Hearts Out creates a unique art experience where place and history are investigated through a series of three dinners. It builds on the rise of the artist-designed meal as a new form of artistic practice and the recent 100-year survey Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art.
Rather than consider the history of Buffalo through images or architecture, artist Lynne McCabe and chef Colleen Stillwell invite the project’s ten edition subscriber teams to travel through this city’s immigrant migrations by eating. Each of the three meals for two will take a moment and time and celebrate its contribution to community memory while adding sophisticated and playful twists to nostalgic dishes.
Eat Your Hearts Out works like a CSA. One signs up for a season of food experiences knowing somewhat what will arrive each month, but also ready and excited for surprises. The first two meals are for pick-up in a special artist designed box. The last meal will be a coursed Pop-Up dinner. Each subscription comes in a custom box and serves two people.
Thur, Oct. 10: The first meal plays on Buffalo’s “past” and the city’s early immigrants - the countless first generation Irishman who built and loaded the grain silos and the Germans who transformed the east side with fruit orchards. This meal will be a take on a traditional working-class stew with many unexpected flavors. Included will be a special three-part bread with a dark seam to represent the very backs and labor this generation gave to build the city. Other baked surprises will be included. For pick-up in the First Ward at Mutual River Front Park.
Thur. Nov. 7: The second meal to represent the “present” plays with Buffalo’s history as an industrial food producer (Cheerios, Wonder Bread, Rich Whip Topping) and the recent farm-to-table movement. Riffing on the idea - packaged from scratch - this meal will include homemade and local-ingredient sourced “Shake ‘n Bake” chicken and “Wonder Bread,” plus a range of unique preserved and fresh products such as green-tomato jam and homemade Oreos and Fig Newtons. For pick-up at the Foundry, 298 Northhampton on the Eastside.
Sat. Dec. 14: The third meal to represent the “future” will be a Pop-Up meal. Traveling through the history of migration in Buffalo each of the multiple courses will highlight and play with the food legacies of its many residents, while dreaming about the future. This meal for the 20 subscribers and the artists will include alcohol.
Location Frank Lloyd Wright Fontana Boathouse.
Eat Your Hearts Out: A Sensual Migration through Buffalos’ Past, Present and Future is inspired by Buffalo and builds on its totemic history, its present revitalization, and a magical vision of its future. McCabe talks about the project as a relationship in a box: her relationship with chef Stillwell, a relationship with the person you share it with, the other edition subscribers, as well as a relationship with the city. This conceptual art project will create a unique and special art and food experience unlike any conceived before, yet deeply rooted in the creative and culinary developments happening today.
Buffalo Rising - Eat Your Hearts Out: The first food & art CSA
Each CSA Dinner subscription is $500. Edition 10.
Includes:
· Three dinners for 2 people (or 6 dinners)
· Two Dinners for pick-up (Thurs, Oct. 10 & Nov. 7)
· One Pop-Up Dinner with alcohol (Sat. Dec. 14)
· And artist designed box and menus
To sign up (or with questions) contact C.S.1 Founder Claire Schneider at 716-884-3971 or schnclaire@gmail.com.
LYNNE MCCABE
Lynne McCabe (b. 1975) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose interactive work focuses on a process-lead and collaborative practice, creating work that is the product of social engagement and negotiation. While McCabe’s most primary medium could be described as conversation (although she creates installations, performances, and photographs), many of her works unfold around meals. For the Blaffer Art Museum’s current installation of Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, McCabe worked with Houston’s Uchi chef Philip Speer to create a culinary translation and evocation of her feminist reinterpretation of Erik Satie’s seemingly infinite, repetitive, and eccentric notated musical composition – Vexations in the Kitchen. Four courses of this dinner all used the same ingredients—sorrel, salmon, and mushrooms—in different presentations. In addition, to play off Satie’s unusual notation of flats and sharps, food was often presented to appear as one thing visually, yet would present a completely unexpected flavor.
COLLEEN STILLWELL
Colleen Stillwell (b. 1983) is a chef based in Buffalo, New York, only recently recruited back to start the Niagara Community College’s new Culinary Institute. Born to parents from South Buffalo with enormous pride for Irish culture, Stillwell was trained at the Culinary Institute in Napa Valley, specializing in pastry under Stephen Durfee, who was part of the staff that opened “The French Laundry” Restaurant in Yountville, CA and who recently competed for Team USA at the World Pastry Cup in France. She then went to New York City, working at Daniel and the Lincoln Ristorante, under Richard Capizzi (previously at Per Se and Bouchon Bakery). She specializes in classic French pastry and chocolate.
FUNDERS
C.S.1 Curatorial Projects’ Echo Art Fair commissions are made possible with support from Catherine and Stephen Foley, Marilee Keller, and Jody and Gerald Lippes.
C.S.1 CURATORIAL PROJECTS
C.S.1 Curatorial Projects was founded by Claire Schneider in 2013 and debuted at the Echo Art Fair. Its focus is on realizing projects that viewers can actively engage in, often becoming participants, and even collaborators in the final realization of work.
Most recently, Schneider organized More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s, 2013, currently at the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville, TN (Sept. 20-Jan. 5). Previous projects include: Extreme Abstraction & Beyond/In Western New York 2007 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art 1998-2008), Seriously Funny and Architecture + Art: 90 Days Over 100° (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Senior Curator 2008-2010). A Nashville native, she received degrees in art history from Tufts University (BA) and Williams College (MA). She is a founding Board Member of Urban Roots Community Garden Center in Buffalo, NY.