September 16- October 28, 2004

Opening Reception - September 16, 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.

"Come and Get it -Last meals and the people who eat them"; "Der Letzte Hot Dog"; "Last Orders"; "La mort sur un plateau"; "Table for One"; "Dinner on Death Row"Š As these titles of features from Aperture, Der Spiegel, Mother Jones, The Observer Food Monthly, Le Matin, Toro and The Sydney Morning Herald Magazine attest, in the past year the international press has emphatically enjoyed publicizing Celia A. Shapiro's photographic series, begun 1999 and ongoing, that throws into relief the loaded symbolism of the "Last Meal."

An astonishing selection of eight chromogenic photographs by Shapiro are among the many fascinating works to be featured in the unusual exhibition opening mid-September in the Photography Gallery, Fine Arts Center Galleries. The special loan exhibition is conceived as a complement to Food, Human Rights, Hunger and Social Policy, the Fall, 2004, Honors Colloquium at the University of Rhode Island. While the exhibition actively concentrates on the status of (over) abundance in western society rather than issues of food insecurity (hunger and malnutrition as charted by the guest lecture series) it accords fully with the Honors Colloquium thesis,

Food is central to our being-not only as sustenance, but also as fulfillment, enjoyment and celebration. It is essential to our existence throughout our lives, and it serves as a symbol of religious, cultural, ethnic, familial and individual identity.

Moreover, through its enticing sampling of modern and contemporary fine art and socio-cultural materials, the exhibition will stimulate viewers' sensory palates as it identifies and interprets the rich visual correlatives of the Colloquium's premise.

Judith Tolnick, director of the Fine Arts Center Galleries, with URI Professor Marquisa LaVelle, a biological anthropologist and active researcher, curated the exhibition called EXCESS. In her tenure as director/curator of the Galleries, Tolnick has undertaken a number of ambitious group photography exhibitions to complement semester-long public investigations of various timely topics. In Memoriam: daguerreotype death portraits (1996); The War in Vietnam-Afterimages (1999) and The Natural Environment-Hopelessly unstrung or pausing to rewind? (in 2 parts, 2001) drew record numbers of gallery visitors. The upcoming exhibition is conceived similarly, guaranteeing an enormously broad University and public audience. Prof. LaVelle is a prominent physical anthropologist who studies human variation, growth, development and aging. That she is professionally self-described as a scholar interested in "the extremes of human adaptability" is perfectly suited to the present project.

The special loan exhibition, presented in tandem with the Fall Honors Colloquium, brings together important contemporary fine art photographs as well as loaded images drawn from popular culture. Objects range from New York artist Sharon Core's elaborately staged and then photographed re-creations of West Coast artist Wayne Thiebaud's painterly paintings picturing vernacular foods (hot dogs, cakes, pies) to George Bush's previously unannounced Thanksgiving, 2003 "photo op" arrival in Baghdad featuring a very convincing platter of (fake) roasted holiday turkey (Pablo Martinez Monsivais for Associated Press), to three-dimensional stereographic views of diners highlighting race, gender and class differences in various distinctive 20th-century American eating environments.

Artists and politicians alike associate themselves with serving a clientele and make creative use of this understanding, the curators suggest, in many remarkable ways. This guiding principle of the curators is addressed theatrically by Cuban American artist Anthony Goicolea in his large-scale, vibrantly colored photomontage entitled Feastlings, 2001. In his Victorian-emulative parody, the photographer repeats his own strikingly adolescent image, complete with proper school uniform, in an athletic "food fight" enacted in an upper crust, overwrought, over privileged traditional Anglo-American setting that makes of its viewers voyeurs, surrogate participants. Elsewhere in the Photography Gallery, an aging, overfed Queen Victoria (photographed in 1897, near the end of her reign) - excess incarnate - seems to preside knowingly over the Goicolea photograph. Deadpan, she is simultaneously a symbol of her own dotage and that of the vast, late Victorian British Empire.

Historical and modern materials on loan from the Culinary Archives & Museum, Johnson & Wales University, help evoke the lineage of several contemporary works to be shown, as the exhibition becomes an actively cross-referential ambience, encouraging viewers, so to speak, to baste and simmer in its socio-cultural stew as they recognize unexpected affinities among the exhibition's ingredients.

For example, President George W. Bush's 2003 Thanksgiving trip as giver of the holiday bird in Baghdad is prefigured by his own 2000 campaign photograph at a Grinnell, Iowa lunch counter (Stephen Crowley for The New York Times), where the then-Governor of Texas is seemingly engaged as the short-order counter person. The strategic sense of inclusiveness and patriotism (or "service") signaled by Bush's various appearances is traced in the exhibition to two earlier examples from the world of 19th-century print culture, November 1869 and December 1876 illustrations from Harper's Weekly. In the former, "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner," a wood engraving by the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast unites Native American, African American, Chinese, Spanish and other ethnic types at a single table around a prominent, architecturally conceived (Jeffersonian) cake bearing slogans of self-governance and universal suffrage. In the later issue, where the politics of the Weekly clearly has changed, E.A. Abbey's illustration of "The Thanksgiving Turkey" depicts a black domestic couple's presentation (aided by a stalking black cat) of a cooked turkey, with accompanying poem entitled "Health to the Gobbler" stating that the Turkey Gobbler "lived and died that we might eat As much as we are able." The degree to which the Bush handlers of today are "on message" and how that message resonates with traditional political caricature and the metaphor of holiday feasting are among the challenging questions posed by this exhibition.

In many ways and from many directions, this exhibition also reflects American pride in purity and prosperity of its food industry and of course, pervasive food consumption. The diffusion of America's prominent role is represented beautifully by elaborate color offset printing in earlier 20th century postcards dedicated to Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses. Viewers will get an after-taste of the gamey, long-lived flavoring of such marketing imagery in a sample didactic poster showing parts of the cow (now beef) designed for the butcher- in-training or, eventually, a restaurant staff. They will also discover related after-effects of this theme in a videotape by the US Department of Agriculture, Science in your Shopping Cart: some of the ways that agricultural research pays off, that might have been made in the postwar period but is in fact fairly recent. Reproductions of Consumer Reports taste testing of the 1950s also suggest the strength of prideful American marketing of its scientific, healthful purity. These are notions celebrated yet undermined by Andy Warhol and other leading American Pop artists who became, instead, lovers and manipulators of advertising for coca-cola, candy bars and other de-stabilizing American kitchen and "junk food" products.

Junk food brings this press release full circle, returning us to Celia A. Shapiro and her "Last Suppers." As we confront eight of these riveting images of the last meals requested by executed prisoners, we come to understand these stark commentaries on the use and abuse of food, and how modest yet potent are these "little trays with little treats" (Charles Bowden, Aperture magazine). Shall we speak of the capital punishment that will prevent the condemned ever from digesting these meals? We seem not to require that that be named, since representation of the meals themselves expresses the dilemma completely. Finally and after all, as this exhibition makes manifest in many different ways, the meal is the measure, as the artist claims.

An illustrated color brochure, designed as a menu, accompanies the exhibition.

It contains an commentary on Excess by URI Professor of Anthropology Marquisa LaVelle, entitled "Food, Feasts and Fatal Attractions."

Fidelity Investments is a major sponsor of the Fall, 2004 Season of the Fine Arts Center Galleries

Photography Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 12 noon - 4:00 pm;

Saturday - Sunday, 1:00 - 4:00 pm

The Galleries are closed on federal and local holidays.

All programs of the Fine Arts Center Galleries are open to the public without charge.

All are handicapped accessible.

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