BEATRIZ YANES MARTINEZ
Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow, Curatorial and Exhibitions
NICHELLE GAUMONT
Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow, Registration and Collections
JAYDE XU
Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow, Education and Programming
Hood Quarterly, summer 2024
In the fall of 2021, the three of us relocated to the Upper Valley to begin our positions in the Mutual Learning Fellowship at the Hood Museum of Art. We were all newcomers to New Hampshire and found adjusting to rural New England life challenging during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the ways we bonded was through shared meals and teaching each other about favorite foods that we grew up with. As we explored ideas for this exhibition, we felt that food and foodways could be a starting point for conversations around place, kinship, and belonging. From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art emerged from our desire to connect our lived experiences with larger conversations around agribusiness, global trade networks and their impact on our foodways.
The artworks in this exhibition span different time periods, mediums, and cultures, illustrating points of connection, disconnection, and reconnection to food. In the first rotation of the show, Kakau Codex by Poli Marichal references the Aztec codex tradition—pictorial manuscripts used to record economic, cultural, spiritual, and practical information—to trace the entangled histories of cacao. A nine-panel codex, this artwork explores our shifting relationship to cacao across time.
In Shijang: ChungGwaMul, Woomin Kim enshrines the ordinary with a detailed quilt of a Korean fruit and vegetable market stall. Korean shijang are bustling spaces where local vendors sell produce, freshly made foods, and home goods. Similar to American farmers markets, shijang also function as important social spaces. Woomin Kim creates her quilts out of a sense of nostalgia for the everyday beauty of these spaces and as a means of connecting to her home while working in New York City.
As co-curators, each of us has likewise connected to works in the show that relate to our own cultural experiences or remind us of home. We invite audiences to reflect on their relationships to foodways, which encompass our attitudes, practices, and rituals around food. Food and art can document our personal and cultural histories. How are you connected to your family, community, or even strangers through food?
This exhibition is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund.
From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art is on view at the Hood Museum of Art, June 8–November 3, 2024.