Long Beach Museum of Art’s ‘Art of Food’ exhibit is deliciously of the time

The Long Beach Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, “The Art of Food”—a sprawling, compellingly complex look at the aesthetics, politics, and social constructions of food—features over 100 works from both the masters and their contemporaries. Andy Warhol. David Hockney. Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. Roy Lichtenstein. John Baldessari. Ed Ruscha. These artists sit alongside the works of Alison Saar, Rachel Whiteread, Lorna Simpson, Jenny Holzer, and Enrique Chagoya, among others.

While this is one of a handful of stops for the exhibit across the past few years—it comes from the ARTnews Top 200 Collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, whose passion for art began as a child in his mother’s modern art gallery in Portland—it marks one of the museum’s most deliciously of-the-time exhibits. Wildly expansive, politically pushy in all the right ways, and utterly gorgeous in its array of disciplines, “The Art of Food” is simply yummy.

The politics and emotions of sustenance highlight “The Art of Food” at LBMA.

Originally curated by Oliva Miller—she’s the Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, which first showcased selected works for “The Art of Food,” given that Tucson is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy—the exhibition is broken into seven categories across the museum’s two floors. Community. Dissociation. Control. Food for Thought. Eye Candy. Still Life. Elixirs and Libations.

But the blatant political and social nature of it all is what is most apparent. It can be a room aligned with Damien Hirst’s “The Last Supper,” where a smashing of religious, consumerist, and health beliefs are openly mocked to show us our contradictions and faulty stances. It can be Lichtenstein’s series of bulls—mimicking that of Picasso’s earlier works—where a cow goes from a clear form to slowly dissolute, making one ponder about the ethics of our current animal consumption and treatment.

There are whimsical takes at excessiveness—contemporary ceramicist Chris Antemann’s beautiful take on the excessiveness of royalty are on full display with porcelain takes on fruit pyramids and Bacchanal-like dinner services—and revolving themes of class, social welfare, nutrition, and emotional fulfillment.

Even the artist themself is examined. Enrique Chagoya’s beautifully biting commentary via “The Enlightened Savage”—where stacks of appropriated Campbell’s soup cans (dubbed “Cannibull’s”) sit next to a can cart—outright criticizes the exploitative relationship artists hold when dealing with gallery owners and art buyers.

Food is political—there’s no way of escaping that.

At its most basic, food is something we need to survive; it is little more than sustenance. Of course—and I say this as both a food writer and the manager of a group of some 80,000 food lovers—its meaning stretches far beyond that. Food connects us to our communities, cultures, relationships, and even our languages. Some of us grow it, some of us deeply focus on consuming it for cultural cachet. But many of us make it our own. We use it as a connecting strand between family members. Or take it as a way to disconnect. We use it for celebrations and for mourning.

Even more, what we eat also carries weight. Our choices are tied to a complex global food system. Food can bring people together—sure, at its best and why we uplift it so much—but it’s also been used for far darker purposes. We use it as a weapon. Use it as political leverage. We use it to exacerbate xenophobia or class superiority. Even in food writing, we other the food of foreigners by italicizing their native words, as if to exoticize what is just common consumption for another culture.

We use to control, suppress, and erase. We worry about health, about how to feed a growing population, and how climate change is already reshaping what and how we eat. These conversations are especially meaningful at this moment—and though “The Art of Food” may not be providing tangible answers to solve such crises, it will perhaps make us more cognizant of how food is inherently political.