American and Indigenous Studies Program Presents

Food and Memory Exhibition

Food and Memory, curated by Olivia Tencer, Mayss Al Alami, and Melina Roise, is an exhibition to accompany the third and final Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuk annual conference. This exhibition showcases 10 works by artist and architect Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee. As part of Lee’s project Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms, these maps “examine the rural future in the context of climate disasters and political upheavals by exploring the intersections of race, labor, and land in agriculture-based collective living projects, particularly in the Northeastern United States.”

Through a research-based investigation with collective farms and food systems changemakers in the Hudson Valley, Lee “reframes rurality as a site of radical reclamation.” Displayed alongside dried food ingredients representing the building blocks of recipes from Indigenous cookbooks, Food & Memory attempts to reveal both the textural and ecological micro– and social and political macro– of our dinner plates.

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Exhibited alongside these works are several Indigenous cookbooks and food memoirs that are a part of the Rethinking Place Collection, acquired for the Stevenson Library during 2024-2025. In conversation with Lee’s maps, these texts focus on land and food as an avenue for social justice (in food sovereignty, rematriation, and foodways revitalization), and as a living archive (in cookbooks, works of food history, seed relations, and writings and theory about naming and classifying environments). The works are also kinetic and organic materials for creation (in material or land-based projects), and include exploration of both cultivated and non-cultivated varietals.

Exhibition Organization, Credits & Sponsorship: The exhibition is made possible by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuk, the Mellon Foundation, Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies, and Bard College Stevenson Library.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail mroise@bard.edu.

Location: Stevenson Library