▼ Café The Art of Food Valley artists reflect on a quirky new exhibit. BY LYNN TRIMBLE L ife went bananas in 2020 for a whole bunch of reasons. Early pandemic days. Election poli- tics. And art world controversy as a banana with duct tape shown during a prestigious art fair got do- nated to the Guggenheim Museum. With so much food for thought out there, it’s a great time to bring some levity to your life with a fun mix of food and art. Metro Phoenix is filled with bars, coffee shops, and eateries showing work by local artists, but you can also take a deeper dive in Tuc- son with an exhibit called “The Art of Food,” where everything from peanuts to meatballs gets the fine art treatment. It’s on view at The University of Ari- zona Museum of Art, where you can see Andy Warhol’s renowned pop art featuring bananas and Campbell’s soup cans, plus works by Wayne Thiebaud, an artist born in Mesa who died on Christmas Day 2021, leaving behind a legacy marked by paint- ings of ice cream cones and other everyday pleasures. “We wanted to show artists that would help create a bridge to the community, so people could explore the art but also think about their own experiences with food,” says Olivia Miller, who curated the show. The lineup boasts work by more than three dozen artists, including Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ells- worth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Rus- Kim Cridler/Lisa Sette Gallery cha. You might not recognize all their names, but you’ve likely crossed paths with their iconic artworks, perhaps right here in Phoenix. In 2018, for example, Phoenix Art Mu- seum opened its “Rauschenberg and Johns: The Blurring of Art and Life” ex- hibit. In 2019, the Heard Museum opened “David Hockney’s Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry.” There’s a reason people are so fasci- nated by these artists’ work, according to Lisa Sette, who owns Lisa Sette Gallery in midtown Phoenix. “They set the stage for what contemporary art is,” she explains. “It’s important to know that history and what artists today are building upon.” In some cases, Arizona artists have been significantly influenced by these artists’ ideas, subject matter, choice of materials, or creative process. Joe Ray, an artist whose paintings and prints exude bright colors and imagery re- flecting his Mexican heritage, cites both Warhol and Hockney as important influ- ences, especially when it comes to the way he uses color. Matt Magee, an artist whose works are filled with symbols and patterns, has a close connection to Rauschenberg’s work, having spent nearly two decades as an archivist, preparator, and registrar at the artist’s New York studio. Ray spends a lot of time cooking, in ad- dition to making art. For him, the common thread between art and food is their capac- ity to stimulate the senses. “When I look down at a plate full of food, I see a palette,” he says. “When I look at something like Thiebaud’s cake paintings, I can almost taste and feel the creaminess of it.” Some- times Ray sees a piece of art and wonders to himself about what the artist must have been eating or drinking at the time, know- ing how much things like texture and smell can impact the creative process. Julio César Morales, a Tempe-based artist and curator for the ASU Art Mu- seum, has long been fascinated by food, in part because his grandfather passed down the story of helping to invent the Caesar salad with gangster Al Capone and a chef at a Tijuana hotel frequented by Holly- wood stars during the 1920s. Working with collaborators including chef Max La Rivière-Hedrick, he’s created live perfor- mance, film, and other works, in which preparing and sharing food becomes a ve- hicle for exploring history and storytelling. “I look at art and food as using the same process,” says Morales. “You have a recipe, or not, and you have ingredients the way an artist has materials. You have to think about how you construct it, and how you use it creatively.” But there’s something else that food and The University of Arizona Museum of Art Olivia Miller, curator of exhibitions for The University of Arizona Museum of Art. art have in common, according to Morales. “They both start conversations, and they both take you back to certain places and times when you experienced them.” Kim Cridler, Basin with Pomegranates, 2016, steel, bronze, beeswax, garnets, 24" high x 36" x 29". Several artists represented by Lisa Sette Gallery have found compelling ways to in- corporate food into their work. For Rachel Bess, oil paintings of rotting fruit envel- oped by darkness are tied to the slow decay and ultimate death of the human body. Meanwhile, Kim Cridler often includes fruit in her metal baskets of precious things. “Food is life, you can’t live without it,” reflects Sette. “Artists want to paint what surrounds them.” Sette also represents Enrique Chagoya, a Mexican-American California-based art- ist whose works include a stack of 10 soup- style cans called Pyramid Scheme with green labels bearing names like Ponzi Chowder and Stimulus Minestrone. In the Tucson exhibit, you’ll encounter Chagoya’s The Enlightened Savage featuring a similar pyramid of cans with red labels for a fic- tional Cannibull’s soup brand with flavors such as Curator’s Liver and Critic’s Tongue. “The Art of Food” includes more than 100 works culled from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family founda- tion. Schnitzer heads Schnitzer Properties, a Portland-based firm whose Arizona holdings include the Scottsdale Airpark Commerce Center. He bought his first piece of art as a teenager and has since amassed a collection of over 19,000 works. According to Miller, who serves as the mu- seum’s curator of exhibitions, more than 500 of those artworks involve food. “This is the museum’s largest exhibition of the last decade, in terms of both the number of works and prominent artists featured, as well as the significance of the subject matter,” explains Jill McCleary, deputy director, and >> p 27 25 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JAN 20TH– JAN 26TH, 2022
