McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Brighton Campus. 2101 Commonwealth Avenue.
Dear McMullen Community,
The past two years as Student Ambassadors and co-chairs of the Publications Committee have been incredible. We’ve had the opportunity to see several exhibits come and go, meet wonderful friends, and acquire knowledge and skills that will serve us throughout our academic and professional futures. We’ve been able to engage with art and helped continue to cultivate an atmosphere of curiosity and inclusion, encouraging our visitors to question their perspectives and open themselves to new points of view. We have published a wide array of articles during our tenure as co-editors and put together a series of works, such as our Problematic Visual Cultural series that focuses on the unjust systems at work behind the art and media we enjoy.
We’ve been exposed to parts of the world that we never knew existed, further expanding our world views and getting to marvel and appreciate extremely diverse works of art. We’ve written and read content about a wide range of topics and shared them with you, such as titles like “Orientalism and Expedition Photography,” “The Art of Food,” and “Fashion, Art, and Social Justice Podcast.”
During the past academic year, the McMullen Museum has given greater attention to the role that diversity, equity, and inclusion play in institutions like museums and universities. In addition to the McMullen’s new EDI committee, we at The Terrace have been making sure that we use our platform for good, spreading information and awareness on topics we care about. The Terrace has always been committed to being a place where students’ voices can be amplified and heard by the community. We will continue to commit ourselves to further social justice and calling out and addressing injustices we experience, either here on-campus or beyond. We hope that new ventures, including the podcasts and the Problematic Visual pieces series, continue to shed light on unique perspectives of art and raise awareness of ongoing dissonances between the world and its artistic styles.
Working here has been an invaluable experience, and while it’s sad to say goodbye, we’re so excited to pass the Terrace onto the committee’s new co-chairs: Ivana Wijedasa (‘22) and Michaela Brant (‘23).
Art is everywhere, from the photos and posters on your wall to the street signs that you pass on your way to work. More subtly, but perhaps most importantly, art exists in the very thing that sustains us: food. In the culinary world, strawberries are transformed into roses, chocolate molded into sculptures, and cake shaped into everyday objects (popularized by a recent Tik Tok trend “Is it real or is it cake?”). Food has become a medium for artwork in numerous different ways, from intricately decorated cakes to decaying bananas.
The image depicts strawberries that have been delicately cut to appear as roses. Photograph: Nathan Congleton, TODAY.
There is a common saying that cooking is chemistry, but I want to focus on the phrase “food is art.” Culinary means “related to cooking,” and arts refers to any broad area of interest. Therefore, culinary arts refer to the art of preparing, cooking, presenting, and serving food. The presentation of food has always intrigued me the most. On popular cooking shows like “Chopped,” time constraints are no excuse for poor presentation. There is an art to food in not only how it tastes, but perhaps, more significantly, in how it looks. A new popular phrase that demonstrates this is “phone eats first.” Today many people take pictures of their food before they eat it, to both save to admire later and share on social media for others to see. Self-proclaimed foods have come to value food for its aesthetic appeal over its taste. One of the clearest examples of this is in the craft of cake making.
The popularity of cake decorating and sculpting is evident through the many shows that revolve around it, such as Cake Boss, The Great British Bake Off, and Ace of Cakes. The process of constructing cakes into a form of art is one that requires patience and a lot of time. The Alice in Wonderland inspired cake pictured below represents the artistic techniques bakers employ in creating cakes that resemble art more than food. Before decorating this cake, the sculpting of it is essential. The cake is composed of four teacups stacked upon one another, balancing asymmetrically. The construction and balance of the cake takes on a process similar to creating sculptures. This process perhaps requires more precision than traditional sculptures, as the material used is a sponge-like, crumbly cake, in contrast to solid stone or marble. The baker uses fondant to construct figures that resemble the characters from the movie and in transforming the sculpted cake into teacups. This cake demonstrates the painstakingly detailed artistic elements of cake decorating.
Photograph: Mike McCarey, Mike’s Amazing Cakes.
The influence of art in cake making is not just evident in their visual appeal and construction, but also in the message that they display. The trend “is it real or is it cake?” popularized on TikTok has demonstrated the power of art in food to make the viewer question reality. It focuses on the prospect of deception and the connection between reality and fictitious worlds. Similar to the purpose of traditional forms of artwork, it highlights the limitations of our eyes and makes us question the truth of what we see. In the image below, we see an example of a hyperrealist illusion cake created by Natalie Sideserf. At first glance, the image on the left side appears to be a regular onion ready to be chopped up and sauteed. However, as the image on the right reveals, it is actually a cake.
Photograph: Natalie Sideserf, Sideserf Cake Studio
Beyond the art of food that is visible in our homes and on social media, the artist Dieter Roth uses food in an unconventional, yet insightful way. He examines the symbolic nature of food’s temporariness in comparison to human life. In a talk hosted by Harvard on March 31, titled “Food in Art,” the speakers discussed how Roth uses decomposing and rotten food as material in his art. Two examples of Roth’s work with food that the lecture mentioned include his “Pocket Room” and “Chocolate Lion (Self-Portrait as a Lion).” The “Pocket Room” consists of a slice of banana pressed onto a card with a rubber-stamped image of a table placed in a plastic playing-card box. The banana slices have gradually grown mold and decomposed. In “Chocolate Lion,” the artist uses chocolate to construct the figure of a lion. Roth uses chocolate as a material to represent himself and to manifest the truth of his human body with how it ages, deteriorates, and turns to dust. Roth chose chocolate because it is known for its immediate consumption and not longevity—just as life is not permanent but temporary.
Roth draws connections between art and food in his physical use of food as material in his artwork and in its deeper representation of life. Art is often associated with its most represented forms as paintings, sculptures, or drawings, which museums display, such as our very own McMullen. But evidently, art takes on more unconventional forms in food. Perhaps art in food will encourage us to examine the less traditional and unexpected forms of art in our everyday lives.
McMullen Student Ambassador Sunny Lee reflects on the meaning of artist Nyeema Morgan’s work during a CURRENTS Presents virtual lecture.
On February 18th, 2021, Boston College’s Art, Art History, and Film Department welcomed American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist Nyeema Morgan to share the thoughts and meanings behind her work during a CURRENTS Presents virtual lecture.
Although Morgan works with sculpting and print-based works, she mainly identifies as a drawer. The Chicago based artist defines drawing as the delineation of space. When Morgan looks at the world, instead of spaces, she sees distinct edges, contours, and lines. She shares that this is her way of organizing and perceiving information. Her creative process begins with using observations of the world and questions that help her brainstorm meaning, prompting her to make diverse artworks.
One of the works she shared is Forty-Seven Easy Poundcakes Like Grandma Use To Make. Morgan began this series during her time as a graduate student at California College of Arts in 2007 and completed it in 2012. This series consists of forty-six pound cake recipes, including her grandmother’s, typed up and drawn over with lines. The lines negate certain parts of the recipes in what she described as a “rule-based process.” Each drawing took her around six to seven hours to create. Her observation that inspired this creation is that her grandmother’s “easy pound cake is the quintessential pound cake. All others are of a lesser quality.” This observation led her to inquire how our lives mold our understanding of the world and the extent to which one thing can change before it becomes classified as another.
In Morgan’s most recent show, THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED, she presents works that examine power dynamics, specifically the relationship between gender and identity. Morgan began her creative process with the observation that women’s right to vote, as a result of the suffrage movement, did not secure the right for all women. She thus asked herself “how do I make a work that embodies offense and defense,” and “how do I implicate the viewer?” The result is her sculpture installation, The Flower (No. 4), where sculpted hands protrude from the museum’s wall holding staffs. The pieces are positioned in an arc to make the viewer feel surrounded. Morgan’s intention is for the viewer to take an identical newsprint sheet which is draped on each staff. Printed on each sheet are stories of women, both fictional and nonfictional, concerned with how the lives of BIPOC and queer women vary from mainstream perceptions of women. The majority of the stories are contrived from Morgan’s own memory.
In Morgan’s career, she has found herself contemplating her role as an artist, specifically what she wants from her art and the art world. She ponders her place in art history as a Black female artist and how her contributions are rewarded or not rewarded in the field. To learn more about Morgan and her art, you can check out the CURRENTS Presents: Nyeema Morgan recording on the McMullen Museum’s YouTube channel or visit her website at https://www.nyeemamorgan.com/.
