Review: “Food” at Kent Cultural Alliance By Mary McCoy

Food is about as basic a topic as you can get, ranking just below Life and Death, both of which are intimately connected with food. Since Colonial days, food production and distribution have shaped the landscape, heritage and culture of Kent County and the greater Eastern Shore, so it was a brilliant move for Kent Cultural Alliance to choose “Food” as the theme for its latest artist residency.

Stop by KCA’s gallery now through May 31 and you’ll find an antique scythe that can be played like an upright bass, a precise, sepia-toned drawing of a strawberry plant with ghost writing barely visible underneath, and hundreds of photographs exploring local food production and distribution.

The three artists chosen for this residency arrived with no knowledge of the area but in keeping with KCA’s focus on arts education and community engagement, they were immediately immersed in visiting local farms, kitchens, food pantries, schools, and historical sites to learn about food production and distribution and to work directly with the people involved. The fact that the artists themselves are as different from one another as possible speaks volumes about the breadth of the subject. A European man who draws traditional still lifes with pastels, a Black woman from Harlem who gives voice to underrepresented individuals through her photographs and videos, and a Midwestern white man who creates large public sculptures that are actually gardens could hardly be more unlike, yet each of them found ways to engage with our community and make art about food.

Tory Tepp, who divides his time between working on rural land art projects in Wisconsin and two “food forests” at a college in Florida, is the only one of the artists whose work was already focused on food. A veteran of creating artworks that double as food gardens, he worked with Kent County Middle School students to create raised beds for growing their own vegetables, but since an indoor gallery lacks sunlight and soil, for this show he created sculptures from detritus he found on the farms he visited as part of the residency.

Swooping floor-to-ceiling, a sculpture made with the curved sections of a silo roof speaks of a vanished era when small farms grew and stored grains for their own livestock, while an impromptu forest made with several slim tree trunks gnawed by beavers lends a bit of magic as well as irony. Even as tens of thousands of acres of wetlands are lost to farming and development each year, beavers are busily using their inborn engineering skills to create the ponds and wetlands so vital to healthy ecosystems and carbon sequestration. Concerned with how industrial-scale farming has altered our landscapes, often in ways destructive to local ecology, Tepp explores our changing environment and the hints of history found everywhere in our rural landscapes while also suggesting that with some open, creative thinking, we may be able to find healthier, more sustainable ways to produce our food.

Sheba Legend took a very different and very direct approach by documenting the people and places she encountered during the weeks she was here. Something in the stark

black-and-white drama of her photographs turns familiar sights—a long farm lane, seas of lettuce stretching into the distance, oven-fresh baguettes standing at attention in a wicker basket—into iconic representatives of the day-to-day production and distribution of the food which sustains us all. Along with such quintessentially rural scenes as clusters of farm buildings and fields of grazing cattle are less expected shots showing a deli menu, a basket of reduced price “ugly fruit,” and a teenager biting into a sweet roll freshly baked by students in the Kent County High School’s Culinary Arts Program.

Drawing on her own experience of hunger and homelessness during a difficult period of her life, she explored issues of food scarcity with a shot of a worker filling the shelves of a food pantry, a close-up of a nutrition label, seedlings growing in the garden at Minary’s Dream Alliance, and photos of several neighborhood “blessing boxes,” small outdoor cabinets filled with free offerings of food and books.

In addition to framed photos, dozens more appear on a computer screen interspersed with short paragraphs offering insights into the value of small, sustainable farms, especially in areas far from grocery stores, the sharing of food through backyard gardens and church suppers, and historical examples of African-American involvement in farming and the seafood industry, as well as in a 1962 march along High Street in what Legend calls the “complicated racial history” of the area. In keeping with her belief in art as a way of opening doors, allowing her the freedom to approach people, ask questions and learn from them, she has given visibility to people and processes that we all kind of know are there but generally ignore. In so doing, she has honored them and made their stories tangible.

Deeply inspired by artists such as Leonardo de Vinci, Radu Leon creates work that is firmly rooted in European art history making him perhaps the most unlikely “Food” artist of the trio, but he is also a world traveler who has lived and taught in Italy, England, Kenya and China and well remembers the inefficient food system in his native Romania, then under communist rule. Although his traditional still lifes and genre scenes would be at home in the pages of an art history book, his focus is less on the finished artworks than on what is behind them.

Like the Old Masters, he makes his own pastels and paint, sometimes including materials he finds locally. Using methods he taught to Kent County High School art students, he experiments with his “recipes” in a process he likens to cooking. Despite their realistic style, his paintings of kitchen scenes, a silver teapot and sailing ships are highly conceptual in that he chooses his materials for their origins and the meanings they convey. A charming still life of crockery and root vegetables is edged with a certain shade of deep red painted with casein tempera, a milk-based paint he made from the brick dust of a kitchen hearth in a Colonial home where enslaved women once cooked. Both the area’s history and its legacy of slavery leap to mind, just as his choice to hang several works from worn rope from the Sultana speaks of both the area’s maritime past and the ropes that once bound slaves or was used to hang them.

With informative, thought-provoking captions accompanying each work, Leon gently reminds us just how closely those of us who are of European descent are still tied to our Colonial heritage. From similarities in our diet, architecture and systems of government to European models and even to the way the word “art” makes us first think of  Western art, discounting the art of other cultures, these tendencies hint at the shadows of ingrained prejudices against non-European peoples still very much alive in our culture.

Perhaps the most telling thing about this show is how each of these artists is so strikingly focused on the potential of art to teach and enrich both artist and viewer. Each of them feels that this residency was a gift, even as their fresh and insightful visions stand as a gift to our community. Even now while National Endowment for the Arts grants, including KCA’s, are being suddenly cancelled, their work proves the power of art to move us, teach us and give us joy.

 

Contributor Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications and has published five books including a recent poetry collection. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.