Bringing the Art of Food to the Everyday | Shelly Boris, Amy Lipton, Elaine Tin Nyo, Linda Weintraub | Fresh Cooking | Art and Food Series Event
FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Is working with food an art? Are chefs and growers artists? Can artists be chefs and growers? Can anyone making food call it art?
Join us to take a closer look at these questions with a conversation between cookbook author Shelley Boris, curator Amy Lipton, artist Elaine Tin Nyo and writer Linda Weintraub. We discuss ways that artists think about the food they eat, the art of cooking and the art of living on the earth. The discussion, moderated by Amy Lipton, also includes information and advice for cooking, raising, producing, procuring and understanding food.
Trained as a painter Shelley Boris has cooked for years as a professional chef. She likes materials like charcoal, wax, paint and pencils the way she loves basic ingredients like onions and eggs. As a mildly dyslexic person, computers and smart phones were a godsend, but the textures and smells and feel of art supplies and food hold great attraction. She paints when she can, and cooks for a living. Her book Fresh Cooking: A Year of Recipes from the Garrison Institute Kitchen, an art project itself, with photographs by Caroline Kasterine, emphasizes cooking with considerable attention to detail, combined with the everyday need to feed oneself and others in a sensible way. Fresh Cooking features recipes that use the best of ingredients—seasonal, sustainable, organic—but there is no preaching. It encourages people to shop where they can afford and cook what they like while thinking of the folks they are feeding, de-emphasizing the precious and the anxious.
Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.
Shelley Boris is partner, creative director, and executive chef at Fresh Company. Fresh runs the food service at the Garrison Institute, Storm King Art Center, as well as for private and corporate clients. She is the author of Fresh Cooking: A Year of Recipes from the Garrison Institute Kitchen,. Shelley is inspired by a diversity of regional cooking styles from around the world and has cooked for such personalities as the Dalai Lama and Mikhail Gorbachev. A board member of the Cold Spring’s Farmers’ Market, Shelley has long worked to support sustainable agriculture in the Hudson Valley. She lives in Garrison, NY, with her husband and two sons.
Amy Lipton is an independent curator and co-director of ecoartspace, a nonprofit dedicated to raising environmental awareness through the arts. She owned and directed Amy Lipton Gallery in NYC from 1989--1996. Since then she has organized exhibitions for museums, galleries, sculpture parks, environmental centers and in the public realm. She writes for books and journals, and organizes discussions and lectures on art and its relationship to the natural environment. Her pioneering museum exhibition co-curated with Sue Spaid, Ecovention: Artists Transform Ecologies with an accompanying 160-page catalog, was held at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH, in 2002. Lipton’s curatorial public art project BiodiverCITY was part of the 5 x 5 Project in Washington D.C., presented by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2012. TRANSported, a temporary public art project took place in May 2013 in conjunction with The New Museum’s, Ideas City Festival at the World Financial Center Plaza and at Sara D. Roosevelt Park in New York City.
Elaine Tin Nyo is a conceptual artist and omnivore. She translates the tradition of genre painting into new media. Since the early 1990s, food has been a vehicle for the artist to explore issues of mortality and responsibility. Using performance, video, photography, cooking and writing, she reframes the everyday rituals of food and its preparation so we may reflect on the inherent beauty and value of the seemingly mundane moments of our lives. In addition to her visual arts background, she has learned at the side of home cooks and restaurant chefs, and collaborated with farmers and butchers on three continents. Now based in New York, Tin Nyo has received project support from the Bronx Museum, Seoksu Art Project, Franklin Furnace and The Phillips Collection, among others. Her photographs, food, videos, installations and performances have been presented at New Museum, Deitch Projects, Creative Time, Färgfabriken, Brooklyn Museum, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, the French Culinary Institute and other venues. Her project This Little Piggy received a Creative Capital Grant in 2013.
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist and author of several popular books about contemporary art. Her recent writing explores the vanguard intersection between art and environmentalism. Her newest book, TO LIFE! Eco Art In Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, published by the University of California Press, is the first college-level eco-art textbook. Weintraub's previous books on eco-art include the series, Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2007). It includes EcoCentric Topics: Pioneering Themes for Eco-Art; Cycle-Logical Art: Recycling Matters for Eco-Art; EnvironMentalities: Twenty-two Approaches to Eco-Art. Weintraub is also the author of In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society. She served as the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Art at Oberlin College, and as the director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute located on the Bard College campus, where she originated fifty exhibitions and published over twenty catalogs.
Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2013, the Art and Food series events peel back the hidden layers of taste and aesthetics across the literary and visual arts with readings and discussions by acclaimed artists, authors, chefs, critics, historians and others.
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