Food, Meet the Artist, and More Food

One of the best things about NYC is the food. Just about every week my friend and I take one night to try something new. So far I've tried, Thai food, Chipotle, Pax pasta, just to name a few. The Pax, make your own pasta bowl was one of the best because I learned a couple of new recipes. Alfredo Fettuccine and Penne with Vodka sauce were two of the dishes that I recreated at home. I love trying out new foods and I love it even more when I can recreate them for myself.

Last week I also had the pleasure of attending Natasha Marin's "Courting Risk:Blackout", one of the Meet the Artist series. When I walked into the room, students were sitting around in a circle and there was an adorable baby crawling around. She played a video which was about a mother breastfeeding her child. It took me a couple of seconds to realize how the baby and her outfit were the same as the video and that she was reenacting her performance in front of us. Pretty soon, we became a part of her performance. She silently motioned for a student to write down everything that was happening. To another, she placed a blindfold over his eyes. She asked my friend to kneel and hold an incense stick. Then she gave me an index card, where I had to fill in the blanks. The card read: My name is ____ Red. My father's name is ______Red. My mother's name is _____Red. My people are known for ____and_____. Remember me.

Then her assistant pulled me over to help paint a sheet of white paper that was spread out. The whole atmosphere was captivating. It was one thing to be a passive viewer, it was another to take a part in the work of art. I was soon painting in a trance as another girl read a poem over and over again, each time replacing a word with the word "Red". Then the poem ended and three of us, myself included, read our index cards. After the performance ended and we discussed what we had just experienced. I thought that Marin's idea to include her audience was brilliant, it was refreshing and completely different from simply entering a museum and looking at a work of art. She even said that because she was silently requesting students to do certain things, we were less inclined to say no. As a result she made us participate and we had fun doing so.

http://www.mikokuro.com/