Walker Kitchen Lab Opens today! Part research, part practice, the goals of the Walker Kitchen Lab are to explore how the kitchen functions as a place for cultural expression and social action and to produce a series of prototype objects and events as experiments in public design. As part of the Open Field, the project also is a platform for investigating new forms of collectivist action and learning in the context of the museum.

Over the next two weeks Kitchen Lab will be inviting a series of guests and collaborators to assist and join in the conversation.  The sessions are open to the public.  No RSVP needed…just come and join in.  Look for more information on the Kitchen Lab site and on the Open Field Facebook page.

GUEST SCHEDULE

Monday, June 18, 1:30 – 2:30pm, Walker Art Lab

Product designer and UMN professor Barry Kudrowitz will lead us through a series of team games based on improvisational comedy training that will help build specific skills related to prolific idea generation. These games also encourage group collaboration, rapid association and problem solving.

Kudrowitz is an assistant professor of product design at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, studying humor, creativity, and idea generation. Kudrowitz co-designed a Nerf toy, an elevator simulator that is in operation at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, and a ketchup dispensing robot that was featured on the Martha Stewart Show. Kudrowitz is the course instructor of Toy Product Design, a project-based class in which he uses play as a means of getting students excited about engineering and design. More information can be found on http://www.wonderbarry.com

Tuesday, June 19, 10am – 11am, TBD (Tour Guide Study or FlatPak)

Seitu Jones, artist and Senior Fellow in Sustainable Agriculture Systems at the University of Minnesota, will talk about his work, including projects around urban farming, orchards and tree nurseries, black environmental thought, social justice, urban infrastructure and community practice.

Working on his own or in collaboration, Seitu Kenneth Jones has created over 30 large-scale public artworks. He uses environmental art and horticulture as tools for artmaking. Seitu’s been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, and a NEA/TCG Designer Fellowship. Seitu was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was artist-in-residence in Harvard’s Ceramic Program. He is currently Senior Fellow in Agricultural Systems, at the University of Minnesota, sharing an endowed chair with urban farmer, Will Allen. Seitu is also on the faculty of Goddard College in Washington State.

Tuesday, June 19, 11:30am – 12:30pm, Walker FlatPak

mnartists.org editor and writer Susannah Schouweiler will lead a workshop focused on writing thick description and detailed and useful instructions.

Schouweiler serves as editor for the weekly updated arts writing published on the homepage of mnartists.org, as well as the site’s twice-monthly e-mag access+ENGAGE. She has written on the arts for a number of other outlets as well, including MinnPost.com, City Pages, Minneapolis Observer, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Rake, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s KnightArtsblog. Before her work with mnartists.org, Susannah served as Editor-in-Chief for Ruminator magazine (a.k.a. Hungry Mind Review, Ruminator Review), a nationally distributed art and literature magazine.

Thursday, June 21, 11am – 12pm,  Walker Tour Guide Study

San Francisco designer and artist Maria Mortati will share some of her work and talk about principles of prototyping and crafting participatory design

Mortati is a museum exhibition developer, project manager and artist. She is continually involved with a diverse set of projects ranging from formal museum exhibitions with complex teams, to short-term informal experiments.Her formal work includes exhibit development for art museums, often involving collaboration with museum staff, boards, and local communities. Her experimental work, which enriches her professional practice, explores mechanisms for engagement through exhibit platforms, installations, public events and writing. Through all of these activities, Maria continues to expand the possibilities of effectively reaching public audiences through exhibitions and the potential of community institutions. Maria holds a BFA the University of Colorado and an MFA from Stanford University.

Friday, June 22, 11:30 – 12:30 pm,  Art Lab

Stephanie Grotta, Design Manager with Target Corporation, leads the Tabletop design team for Target’s Product Design and Development group.  She  will talk about design process, how to see, find, or make trends in tabletop design, link it to other trends, and how they move an idea through to production.

Grotta‘s team develops design strategies in response to business need and trend, culminating in the design of over 35 collections for the table, kitchen, and pantry each year.  Prior to her current role, Stephanie was the Lead Designer for Smith & Hawken at Target, where her work garnered over 20 design patents, and her designs for the Solenti Teak furniture collection received a 2011 International Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum and European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. Before joining Target, Stephanie was Principal Landscape Architect at Coen + Partners in Minneapolis.

Friday, June 22, 12:45 – 1:45pm, Art Lab

Amanda Lovelee will be presenting some of her past work to the students in the context of the Kitchen Lab and Open Field, helping to explore how art and design can bring bring people together.

Lovelee is a visual artist based in Minneapolis, MN. She is interested in how people connect and the spaces in which they do so within contemporary society. Her work, mainly video and photography, weaves together data, stories and personal experience to create non-linear narratives about the fragility of human relationships. Her recent work has explored a myriad of topics: family history, the lives of beekeepers and ice fishermen, strangers’ love stories and the sociology of square dancing. She has an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has shown both internationally and across the US in Italy, Los Angles, New York City, Minneapolis, Hartford, and Seattle.

Monday, June 25, 1 – 2pm, Grove (FlatPak if raining)

John Kim and Sam Gould will explore the acts of collecting and distributing within the contexts of food and community, using their personal interests and experience to inform the Kitchen Lab programming.

John Kim is a new media artist and assistant professor of Media Studies and Cultural Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul. He has exhibited work internationally,  including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, ISEA, the DiaCenter for the Arts, and others.

Sam Gould is co-founder of Red76, a collaborative art practice which originated in Portland, Oregon in 2000. Along with his work as the instigator and core-facilitator of many of the groups initiatives, Gould is the acting editor of its publication, the Journal of Radical Shimming. He is a full-time visiting faculty member within the Text and Image Arts Department of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, as well the Director of Education for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland, ME. He is a frequent guest lecturer at schools and spaces around the United States and abroad, and has activated projects and lectures on street corners, in laundromats, bars, and kitchen tables, as well as through collaborations with museums and institutions such as SF MoMA; the Walker Arts Center; the Drawing Center; the Bureau for Open Culture; Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; ArtSpeak; Printed Matter; the Cooper Union; the New Museum/Rhizome; Manifesta8; and many other institutions and spaces worldwide.

Tuesday, June 26, 11:30 – 12:30pm, Grove (FlatPak if raining)

Chris Olson, who develops community-based food events when not managing Masa Sushi and Robata, will lead a workshop diving into the history of group dining. Conversation will segue into food exchange over lunch.

Milwaukee naive Chris Olson has been cooking in professional kitchens for the last 14 years.  He has lived on both coasts (Boston, Mass and Portland, Oregon), but has made Minneapolis his home.  Chris has taken his cooking skills and applied them in less conventional events, co-founding Paired (an underground supper club) collaborating on the 100-course dinner and hosting The Church of the Pancake during Art-a-Whirl.  When Chris is not running the kitchen at Masu Sushi and Robata at the Mall of America, he’s relaxing in his south Minneapolis home with his fiance, Kirsten Peterson, and their Australian Shepard, Pollock.

Tuesday, June 26, 1 – 2pm, Tour Guide Study

Historian Tracey Deutsch will discuss her project, “Putting Kitchens in Their Place,” which uses  the nation’s most famous kitchen–Julia Child’s—to encourage discussion  about how and why so many Americans became so interested in food and food politics in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Deutsch teaches and researches the histories of domestic labor,  consumption, and food provisioning as an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota.  She teaches courses on twentieth-century US history, the history of capitalism, and women’s history.  Her first book, Building a Housewife’s Paradise, University of North Carolina Press, 2010) explored the origins of supermarkets.  She has also written on the ways that historical narratives shape contemporary concerns about nutrition and local eating (“Memories of Mothers in the Kitchen,” Radical History Review, April 2011) .  Her current work, “The Julia Child Project” contextualizes Julia Child and gourmet food in 1960s cold war culture.   She has been a fellow at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Wednesday, June 27, 10 – 11am, Parked on Vineland

Tamara Brown, registered dietician, chef, and owner of Sassy Spoon Food Truck will talk about what it takes to create a food truck and bring food to the streets: food safety, permits, what kinds of food she prepares and why, and encounters/stories she has had with her clientele.

She holds Masters degrees in Public Health and in Nutrition from the University of Michigan. Brown has several years of experience counseling clients and teaching nutrition classes. The connection between food and how the body functions and feels led her to her menus of foods rich in healthy fats, high quality proteins, with lots of fruit and vegetables. With her love for cooking hearty and wholesome meals, she decided to move from teaching nutrition to providing nutrition. Combining her passion for health and cooking lead to the creation of Sassy Spoon food truck in 2012.

Wednesday, June 27,  2-3 pm, Tour Guide Study

Rita Panton will be discussing her art, her ideas concerning food, kitchens and social justice, and her work with nonprofit Open Arms, a nonprofit organization that cooks and delivers healthy food to people living with life-threatening diseases.

Panton is a baker/chef at Open Arms of MN as well as a ceramic artist. She is the kitchen liaison to the Open Farms organic farm project at Open Arms. Rita holds a BFA from the University of MN, is a former head baker at the Seward Co-Op, and has worked at many kitchens in the Minneapolis area.

Wednesday, June 27, 3 – 4pm, Tour Guide Study

Michelle Horowitz, activist, chef, and executive director of North Minneapolis nonprofit Appetite for Change, will talk about this North Minneapolis organization that brings people together around food to build capacity for creating social, racial, and economic justice while bettering communities and making families more powerful agents of change.

Horovitz is the Founder and Executive Director of Appetite For Change, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using growing and cooking healthy foods as a tool to build health and wealth in low-income and communities of color.  AFC works with residents to build strong families and healthy communities around food. Michelle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Bioethics and Spanish and earned a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law school. She worked as an Assistant Public Defender in Miami-Dade county from 2005-2009.  Michelle then worked for James Beard Award winning Chef Michelle Bernstein as a prep cook, line cook and assistant to the pastry chef before returning to Minneapolis. Ms. Horovitz sat on the Board of Directors for Gardening Matters in 2010-2012 and has been actively involved in the leadership team of the Northside Local Food Resource Hub.  She also currently serves as a Co-Coordinator for the Northside Fresh coalition and on the Advisory Committee for the West Broadway Farmer’s Market. She is an activist and dedicated leader who is passionate about effecting policy, systems and environmental change in the food system in order to address food insecurity and food-related health disparities.

Thursday, June 28, 10:30 – 11:30am, Tour Guide Study

Chef and cultural producer Chris Roberts will talk about his work with food and performance, specifically organizing pop-up restaurants with courses synched to installation and performance at feminist queer community art center, Madame.

Roberts is a curious mind exploring food, art and community building. He has worked in the Twin Cities and elsewhere as a retoucher, photographer/videographer and VJ, and more recently as a cook and food-based artist. Together with his brother, Rhett Roberts, he is a co-founder of BroJobs- an outfit for conceptual catering and food art. Chris’ latest project was collaboratively creating two Pop-Up Restaurants, edible evenings of artist-created performance and installation art. This summer he will be serving as Sous Chef for the fourth season of Mixed Precipitation’s Picnic Operetta, an edible opera served in community agriculture spaces throughout the metro area.