Back to All Events

Event: Playing to the senses: An Evening of Food and Discussion with Elizabeth Thacker Jones

Friday, April 29, 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Organized in conjunction with the Prolonged Engagement exhibition, and inspired by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’ Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium*, Elizabeth Thacker Jones addresses the link between performance and food as it relates to the growing interest in local and regional food systems, and specific artistic practices that revolve around ideas of prolonged engagement and sustainability.  To ground the conversation, Jones and curator Erin Sickler will provide a dinner made from locally sourced ingredients.  The event is $13 per person and BYOBeverage; seating is limited.

*In Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium, folklore and performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett draws several parallels between food and performance.  First, that they are both executed, using various tools, actions, and materials; second, that they both behave, as governed by laws, customs, and habits; and finally, that they are displayed, requiring participants to understand these products as aesthetic objects.  In relation to artists’ interest in food as a medium, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asks: Since cooking techniques, culinary codes, eating protocols, and gastronomic discourses are already so highly elaborated, what is there left for professional artists who chose to work with food as subject or medium to do?  By inserting the undeniably sensual experience of eating into the rare, abstracted discourse of art, artists are able to reframe both the nature of food and the nature of art by highlighting their respective roles as historical, social, and phenomenological elements.

To RSVP please contact

Elizabeth Thacker Jones works to understand our relationships to food systems. Her focus is on programming for emerging educators and designers to address access to healthy and sustainable food. She is currently a Nutrition Educator in New York City Public Schools in collaboration with Studio in A School, NYC Greenmarket and Columbia Teachers College. She is known for her pies and vast knowledge of sustainable caviar. She received her BA in Visual Art and French from Oberlin College (2002) and is pursuing a Food Studies MA from New York University. Elizabeth lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.