Memory Dishes Exhibition Opening

Exhibition on view from May 24 – October 31.

Torn from their homelands, families, and traditions enslaved people and free Blacks reimagined their culinary landscape in the “New World” by blending traditional recipes with indigenous and European staples. In personal gardens, plantation kitchens, urban markets, taverns, and over open-fire hearths, free and enslaved Black people used food and cooking as tools of resistance, remembrance, and independence as they fed their oppressors, themselves and their communities.

In the US, descendants of enslaved Africans and immigrants of African descent continue to cook in the traditions of their ancestors, adapting traditional foods to their contemporary lives. A combination of cuisines–African, African American, Caribbean, and more–form 21st Century Black American cooking. This exhibit highlights the meals and cooking practices of fives families within Providence’s diasporic community. Using contemporary storytelling, archival materials, and culinary objects, Memory Dishes explores how a recipe can illuminate the ways people of the African Diaspora use food to connect to both their present and past.

Exhibition opening: May 24, 4:30 – 7pm

This exhibition is part of Year of the City: www.yearofthecity.com.