Museum Picks
Sojin Kim’s Museum Pick: L.A. Menu Munchies (DVD) This DVD by Collage Ensemble, Inc. is like the best of potlucks. It offers up an eclectic and tasty array of dishes prepared by people who love their food, their families, and their communities. Part guidebook, part culinary show, this DVD is organized into chapters that show the importance of food to our creative, social, and cultural experiences. There are chapters, for example, that show shopping for Persian New Year, coloring eggs for Russian Easter, frying up a batch of okonomiyaki, and preparing pancakes for a family breakfast. I especially enjoy the segments showing cooks in their homes because of the detailed glimpses these provide into people’s kitchens with their particular arrangements of condiment squeeze bottles, mixing bowls, utensils, and miscellaneous tchotchkes. This DVD celebrates how food inspires art, ingenuity, and a sense of communion with others. It shows the tasty creativity and diversity occurring in kitchens throughout the region. It offers recipes, visual tours, performances, and cooking demonstrations that may pique your interest for culinary adventure, increase your food vocabulary, make you hungry, and provide unexpected ideas and tips that expand your recipe routine. L.A. Menu Munchies is a labor of love created by Collage Ensemble, Inc., the city’s longest running inter-ethnic arts collective. The pieces featured on the DVD were developed by Alex Alferov, Mona Kasra, and Alan Nakagawa with contributions from over 40 artists and food-loving Angelenos. Nakagawa explains, “We’ve been working on this project for about two years, going to our favorite local restaurants and being invited into people's homes for a good meal, it’s not a normal cookbook video, this is something more poetic and somewhat abstract. It’s our survey of our city through food.” For more information, check out www.pacce.com. Sojin Kim is a curator at the Japanese American National Museum. Her past projects include the exhibitions Boyle Heights: The Power of Place and Big Drum: Taiko in the United States. She is currently developing a new exhibition, Landscaping America, which which explores the myriad ways in which Japanese Americans have shaped the landscape through the introduction and American adaptation of gardening techniques, garden styles, and native plants from Japan. October 2006 | Related: |
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