The interwoven realms of eating and art-making are inspiring discussions and projects all around us. We open a magazine or browse the internet and something just pops up, bringing our minds and stomachs ever closer together. It feels right, which is how the folks at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art must’ve felt when they decided to organize their exhibition, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. Opening this week, the show brings together artists who have riffed on the communal meal in very different contexts, to various ends.

Lee Mingwei's The Dining Project. photo via https://blogs.uchicago.edu/feast/

Feast, the first exhibition of its kind, surveys the emergence of the artist-orchestrated meal, assessing its roots in early-twentieth century European avant-garde art, its development over the past decades within Western art, and its current global ubiquity. The exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to other influential artists—from the Italian Futurists and Gordon Matta-Clark to Marina Abramović and Rirkrit Tiravanija. It also will present new and restaged projects that will allow the public to experience first hand the ways in which artists are using the meal as a catalyst for artistic expression.

Feast opens with a public reception on Wednesday, February 15, from 7:30–9 pm. The evening features beer and conversation with conceptual artist Tom Marioni, a performance by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi, and the debut of Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck), which will be parked outside the Smart Museum serving regional Iraqi cuisine on limited edition paper replicas of Saddam Hussein’s china.

There’s a also a wonderful blog that documents the show’s development and explains the work of the artists involved. Check it out for inspiration as well as insight into the fine art of eating.