Breathless

2023

Cheap poster paper, wheat paste
18″x24″ each

READ MORE

Soupy, Salty, Sonic!

2020

Food, ASMR, mixer and speakers, lighting, slide show

Led by Hank and Bean
Sound: Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg
Thanks to Sunview luncheonette and Dylan Gauthier

Presented at Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn, NY

This work is part of the project:

Soupy Salty Sonic, an edible exploration of fluid ocean spaces was a beta dinner and an aural/oral experiment, in conjunction with the exhibition “Wet Logic” at bitforms gallery.

READ MORE

Eating the Map

2019

Food, printed fabric maps, plexiglass, prototyping materials, print graphics/texts

Chef: Jen Monroe / Bad Taste
Artists: Marina Zurkow with Lydia Jessup and Ashley Jane Lewis
Documentation: Gilad Dor

Commissioned by the Guild of Future Architects

To kick off the Guild of Future Architects’ Future Imagination Summit, Monroe and Zurkow created an interactive, edible map and visioning workshop looking at the present and future of food equity and climate change in New York’s 5 boroughs. 50 participants ate, engaged in discussion, and played — both with their food and other art-making material…

READ MORE

Rising Seas Jellyfish Snack Shack (LAX)

2019

Cannonball jellyfish, ice plant, kombu seaweed, condiments, laser-cut lettering, signage, tarp, stencil, plants

In collaboration with chef duo Hank and Bean

Commissioned by LENS (Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategy), IOES (Institute of Environment and Sustainability), UCLA

This work is part of the project:

A one-day pop up jellyfish jerky snack shack on the campus of UCLA. Serving Cannonball jellyfish jerky served with a choice of seasoning condiments reflective of 5 diverse regions susceptible to sea level rise: Haiti, the US Gulf coast, Sri Lanka/ S. India, Philippines, and the Netherlands. In addition, the snack shack served “invasive” ice…

READ MORE

Making the Best of It: Jellyfish

2018

Food, performance, props, slide show

In collaboration with Hank and Bean

Supported by Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES), UCLA, led by Allison Carruth

This work is part of the project:

A dinner and movable feast exploring the edible desertification of the Los Angeles region, one whose contemporary culture still holds dear the sensibility of a Mediterranean diet.

READ MORE

Making the Best of It: Dandelion (Potlucks)

2017

Food, dandelions, placemats, writing materials, thoughtful company

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux and Sarah Libertus
with Jim Bovino/Topos, Courtney Tchida, Tracey Deutsch
All images courtesy Dan Marshall.

Presented at The Good Acre, Minneapolis
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

This work is part of the project:

The invitation: These Dandelion potlucks provide a community meal space to gather, share food, and explore key questions connecting food and climate change. They’re a more informal chance to add to the meal story sharing toolkit that Making the Best of It has been cultivating.

READ MORE

Making the Best of It: Dandelion (Eulogies for the Human Species)

2017

Dandelions, beets, custom structure, sod, music, paper, costumes, banners

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Libertus, Aaron Marx
Dandelion kvaas by Jim Bovino
Dandelions and more from Courtney Tchida
All images courtesy Dan Marshall

Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

This work is part of the project:

“Join us in a ritual festivity that invites you to become more dandelion. From trans-species oration to cow eulogies to intimate ocean tributes, this is the party of Making the Best of It, a communal service compressed into the space of a toast—to how all of us are making the best of it, now and…

READ MORE

Making the Best of It: Dandelion

2016

Dandelion leaves, flowers, tincture, custom structures, costumes, tour guides, umbrellas, meadow

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Petersen, Aaron Marx
All images courtesy Dan Marshall

Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

http://makingthebestofit.today/
This work is part of the project:

Over the course of 16 months in Minneapolis, geographer and social practice artist Valentine Cadieux and Marina Zurkow, with a group of collaborators and participants, explored what it might mean to “make the best of it” (“it” being climate change), using dandelions to think through eating differently, nimbly, with sadness, resilience and even joy.

READ MORE

Making the Best of It Jellyfish (Houston)

2016

Custom Cannonball jellyfish soup powder, caramels, snack puffs

Food prototypes by chefs Ryan Pera (Coltivare), and Justin Yu and Ian Levy (Oxheart)

Supported by CENHS (the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences) at Rice University

This work is part of the project:

Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regional site-specific pop-up food shacks, installations, carts, tea houses, delivery drones, and designed community dinners that feature edible climate-change enabled, and often not normally eaten, indicator species as part of the menu.

READ MORE

Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geological Time (Houston)

2014

Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests

Collaborators: Lucullan Foods

Hosted by Joseph Campana and Timothy Morton, with generous support from The Arts Initiatives Fund and The Humanities Research Center.

Presented by CENHS (Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences @ Rice)

This work is part of the project:

A dinner for 50, co-hosted by philosopher Timothy Morton and poet Joseph Campana, that explored the concept of Deep Time and the multiple million-years-long process of fossil fuel formation, embodied in a seven course meal. The guests were primarily from the academic and arts communities in Houston. The purpose was to field test the effect…

READ MORE

Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geological Time (Boston)

2013

Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests
808 Gallery Boston University

With Lucullan Foods and Michael Connor

Presented by the School of Visual Arts, in collaboration with Boston University’s Programs in Food and Wine.

This work is part of the project:

The French phrase hors d’ouevre literally means “outside of the work,” that is, outside the design of the meal. Petrochemicals infuse our foods, and while these byproducts of petroleum lie outside our designs on eating, they are intimately meshed with the foods we produce, transport and consume.You are invited to a multi-course tasting that invokes…

READ MORE

The Cute, the Bad and the Ugly

2012

Lecture and tasting for invasive species

In collaboration with chef and exotic food procurer Gene Rurka

Presented by MAM Contemporaries

MAM Contemporaries’ presented “The Cute, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Inspired by the exhibition Marina Zurkow: Friends, Enemies, and Others, on view at MAM (Sept 2011 – Mar 2012), this unique participatory food performance comprised a lecture led by the artist and a tasting catered by Gene Rurka, the celebrity exotic chef, hunter, and farmer, known…

READ MORE

Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem

2012

‘Local’ dinner for 25, menu, prints

In collaboration with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman
Chefs: Lucullan Foods (Lauryn Tyrell, Loryn Hatch, and Albert Nyguyen)
Foragers: Holly Drake, Oliver Kellhammer, Bun Lai, Andrew Nundel & your hosts
Photo documentation: M.Cianfrani, M_DOK

Commissioned by The Artists Institute

The Invitation You are invited to “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem,” a dinner that renders the local exotic, and the exotic all too local. We are serving a meal harvested in nearby waters or foraged on the adjoining shores. Tong-ho. Whores’ eggs. Knotweed. Sapidissima. Sumac. These words feel strangely potent in the mouth. Language…

READ MORE

Not an Artichoke, Nor From Jerusalem

Research Blog | February 5, 2012

  What is local? As a challenge to currently marketed notions of ‘sustainable,” “green” and “locavore,” Michael Connor, Alex Freedman and I conceived of and created  a formal “explorer’s club” style dinner for 25 at the Artist’s Institute in New York on Jan 16th 2012. “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem” was a dinner that…

READ MORE

Local Heroes

Research Blog | January 14, 2012

  I am co-conceiving a dinner that takes a new look at the “local” (info in next post) with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman at The Artist’s Institute (Anthony Huberman/Hunter College space in the LES) on Monday Jan 16. A lot of amazing people were involved – – Environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer helped us forage…

READ MORE