Michael Rakowitz, Artist Talk

Michael Rakowitz will discuss his food-related art projects including Spoils and Enemy Kitchen. Reception and book signing to follow.

Michael Rakowitz, known for his complex and politically charged sculptures and installations will speak at Brown University about his new and ongoing food-related art projects. Mr. Rakowitz will also be available to sign his new cookbook A House with a Date Palm Will Never Starve: Cooking with Date Syrup: Forty-One Chefs and an Artist Create New and Classic Dishes with a Traditional Middle Eastern Ingredient.

Rakowitz first became well-known in the art world through his 1998 installation paraSITE, an ongoing project in which he custom builds inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system.

His award-winning artwork has also involved food – particularly food inspired by the cooking of his mother, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant. In his 2003 project, Enemy Kitchen, Rakowitz opened a food truck in Chicago that serves Iraqi food co-prepared by Iraqi chefs and U.S. veterans of the Iraq War. Spoils, a 2011 culinary intervention, involved Rakowitz serving dinner at an upscale Park Avenue restaurant on dinnerware that had been looted from Suddam Hussein’s palaces.

About Michael Rakowitz

Rakowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, for which he received $100,000 to continue both his food and non food-related projects, including The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which is about reconstructing the priceless works of ancient art that have been destroyed by ISIS. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, Lombard Freid Gallery in New York, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea in Torino, and Kunstraum Innsbruck. His public project, Return, was presented by Creative Time in New York in 2006. He is the recipient of a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. His work features in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan; and UNESCO, Paris. His solo exhibition, The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own was on view at Tate Modern in London in 2010.