Potluck: Chicago and Feast!

While my cornbread cooks and cools for our Potluck tonight, I thought I'd blog about what has been happening with Potluck: Chicago in the past few days.

Here are the panels of what Potluck: Chicago has done so far, displayed at the Smart Museum for the current exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. We are all so proud to have come so far. We started in November, as Critical Encounters art residents at Columbia College, meeting Ali and Tim from Motiroti for the first time with no idea where we would be in the future. We have ended up with something wonderful.

We had post-its for visitors to write their answer to "What is your comfort food?" At the end of the night the piece was completely covered with post-its, and almost impossible to see the CTA transit map: a lovely metaphor.

Here is La Keisha inviting people to our Potluck that is happening tonight!

Deirdre, Chelsea, myself, La Keisha, Jessica!

This was an amazing buffet, Flying Feast by Sonja Alhäuser. These were large butter sculptures that later visitors were allowed to eat!

Servers were walking around with these butter sculptures.

Enemy Kitchen by Michael Rakowitz. Iraqi food served by American veterans of the Iraq War.

The next morning we hit the CTA platforms and streets to invite people to our potluck tonight. Here is Helen and David all geared up with aprons and plates.

"Do you like potlucks?" was the icebreaker and it worked! So few people said no and we have received about 30 responses to our invitation! Some yes's for tonight and some no's but yes to potlucks in the future.

We started at Lawrence on the red line and made our way south to Garfield. Next time I will get the guts to hand out plates!

Tonight in Garfield Park, we are hosting a potluck. My cornbread is cooling, it's time for me to leave!

Potluck: Chicago, "We Want People to Eat Together!"

Potluck: Chicago is back at Columbia to meet with Ali from Motiroti one last time before we are on our own. We are discussing our plate intervention that we have come up with. We want to pass out these plates to strangers and ask them to join us on Friday for a Potluck. On the plate is a survey for people to take to answer some questions about their food/neighborhood/and if they'd like to join us for a Potluck.

Here we are sticking the 2,000 stickers on the 2,000 plates.

More sticker to plate sticking....

2,000 plates all done!

We made a wonderful list of what we want Potluck: Chicago to be.

Opening tonight at the Smart Museum, a diary of what we have done so far will be displayed at Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art! It will be showing from February 15 - June 10. We will be passing out some of our plates and asking people "What is your comfort food?" which will then be stuck on the wall. We will also be taking peoples photographs with their post its and including them on the wall.