YES, CHEF

On view through December, 15 2024

5th and 6th Floors, 161 Water Street, NY, NY 10038

Gallery Open Hours:

Admission to the exhibition and public programming is free

ABOUT

'The mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only: bread and circuses. 'I hear that many will perish.' 'No doubt, The furnace is huge.'

-Juvenal, Roman Poet (160-127 CE)

YES, CHEF presents works by 34 artists whose work explores the connections between food and power by recognizing the ancestral, erotic and visceral attributes of food. This exhibition traces the objects, hierarchies, and rituals that organize the ways we commune and break bread together.

Popularized in contemporary culture by dozens of cooking shows, the turn of phrase 'Yes, Chef' originates from the French brigade style kitchen, a direct descendant of the systematic military kitchen. The cheeky usage of the expression in common parlance speaks volumes about our relationship to domination, authority, and violence, particularly how these themes intersect with desire, consumption, and sustenance.

Food, and more specifically the art of cooking, is a framework for maintaining and redefining our own identities. Ingredients and special recipes can serve as living memory, tracing the lines of those that have come before. Food not only nourishes us physically but also emotionally and spiritually. It is often the keystone in our stories” from the secret ingredients that sustain our communities, to the unexpected culinary hybrids that serve as proof of our adaptation, as we have moved and migrated and survived.

Artists look to food and cooking to address desire, loss, grief, relocation, consumption, nostalgia, and domination. Many of the works on view hold the tension between nurture and violence or care and consumption, while also spotlighting the broader migrations of foods, traditions, and peoples.

YES, CHEF invites us to excavate the power structures and historical narratives that are inherent in our systems of growing, processing, selling, buying, cooking, and eating food. We are what we eat, and YES, CHEF presents a framework to savor and digest the complexities of our relationship with food, and where it intersects with domination, decadence, deliciousness, and decay.

- Zoe Lukov, Water Street Projects Curator-at-Large

YES, CHEF Artist List:

Janine Antoni, Benezate, Tania Bruguera, Gabriel Chaile, Emma Cook, Patrisse Cullors, Alex Da Corte, Nicholas Galanin, Lauren Halsey, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Camille Henrot, Lucia Hierro, Zhang Huan, Devin B. Johnson, Gabriel Kuri, Sarah Lucas, Jumana Manna, Chris Miller, Marilyn Minter, Miralda, Jeffrey Meris, Emeka Ogboh, Claes Oldenburg, Bony Ramirez, Kathleen Ryan, Alison Saar, Eduardo Sarabia, Lorna Simpson, Tavares Strachan, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Nari Ward, Kiyan Williams, Chloe Wise, and Eric Yahnker.