The Art of Food focuses on food as an essential cultural component that builds communities and fortifies human relationships. More than one hundred drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and ceramics by thirty-seven artists from the Jordan Schnitzer Foundation will be exhibited. Among these are major postwar figures such as David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol; contemporary artists including Enrique Chagoya, Jenny Holzer, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Rachel Whiteread; and artists with deep roots in the East End of Long Island, including Robert Gober, Roy Lichtenstein, and Donald Sultan. The exhibition is organized by the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
The exhibition relates to the East End of Long Island’s distinguished history as one of the most important fishing and agricultural regions in New York State. The area was developed into agricultural land by the 1640s, and by the 1820s as many as 95 percent of the residents lived on farms. While Greenport and Sag Harbor were ports for trade and whaling, Peconic Bay was known for its fish and shellfish. Today, the East End remains an agricultural center, producing more than one hundred different crops, and an increasingly prominent wine region with more than sixty vineyards.
In conjunction with the exhibition and in celebration of the region’s agricultural history, special food events will be organized in partnership with the James Beard Foundation, local farmers, and food organizations, and will entail educational programming, workshops, and conversations featuring local and national thought leaders of the food community.
