In your work documenting and developing artists, how do you see Ghetto Gastro operating in and around the food space?

I see Ghetto Gastro in relation to how, in the contemporary art world, we think about relational art or relational aesthetics, and this participatory action where things exist as they are created.

While rooted in the Bronx, my sense of Ghetto Gastro is that they’re all over. That it is global, that wherever it lands, it is bringing where it’s from with it, but it’s also responding to wherever it is. So perhaps highly twenty-first-century in that way.

What’s important about that is, from my perspective as a curator, thinking about visual art by artists of African descent, this idea of geographies is critical to understanding past, present, and potential futures as they relate to aesthetic innovation that marks our culture.

Director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden. Photo by Mireya Acierto/Getty Images.

Are there artists or periods that come to mind when you think about that cyclical nature of telling our own stories?

There are lines that can be drawn between different periods and ideas. Rooting in community definitely speaks to political and cultural ideals of the 1960s. In the moment that StudioMuseum was founded, 1968 in Harlem was a big year—the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre were also founded. Then just one year later, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. Many of our organizations come in that sixties period. They use “museum” in our name. So that was consciously looking at the museum field as a whole but also creating something totally new. That’s where Ghetto Gastro is in the culinary space: looking at the field, acknowledging it, having reverence for its traditions while reimagining them, reinventing them, remaking them.

I do see ideas of Ghetto Gastro being aligned to efforts visual artists have been making to create institutions. Projects like Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation or Art + Practice, which is Mark Bradford’s organization in Los Angeles, or what Rick Lowe created with Project Row Houses in Houston, and many others. There are people like Vanessa German and Julie Mehretu, visual artists who have seen what it means to create space, often in places where the intersection between art and community is strong and can be an avenue, a lever, to create greater access to democracy.

I know you all have lots of relationships to artists as individuals, but I want to draw the line between the larger effort that others have made and will make. I’d love to speak to the culinary aspect and where that lives and sits within this larger space of creativity, from a perspective of the culinary as a creative pursuit and whether that creativity comes out of necessity.

When we think about Black culinary history, we understand that a lot of the creativity came out of necessity. But we can also see culinary as it relates to creativity, and that creativity being away in which the self is expressed. Think about the home cooks. Those people who cooked for us in the domestic sphere who expressed their brilliant creativity through the culinary.

Black Power Waffle. Excerpted from Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, with Osayi Endolyn (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2022. Photo by Nayquan Shuler.

That’s a great point, especially because the creativity as self-expression, as a kind of playfulness, can be a point of departure for some. But we deserve that too, right? We have this history of struggle and necessity, survival. But there’s also always been a space to create levity and be celebratory, to do things just because.

Yes. What’s important about a project like Ghetto Gastro is that it ties deeply to the way in which food in and of itself is a way that we create community. The ways in which we engage in community. In the idea of food culture, to eat is a way to understand culture at large, which is how I feel about art.

I often say to young people, you can travel all over the world looking at art. Like, when I’m engaging with our young folks Uptown, I say, go to the museums all around the city, and through that experience, you experience aspects of all these different cultures, past and present, through art. Food offers very much the same experience.

When we talk about where we are in our culture, and all the ways that we can talk about what comes from the disconnection between people, food culture is one of those ways that we can re-­create and reinvent. I have always been aware of how much people’s own personal stories one can narrate through food. When you narrate through food in that way, it becomes a way to understand someone’s life—where they’ve been, where they lived, who they are.

Growing up, my food life was very involved with the fact that my mother did not like doing home cooking. My mother, born in 1930, she was one of those women—that home-cooking thing was work and she was not going to do that. However, my grandmother, my father’s mother, lived with us. My mother was born and raised in Bed-Stuy [in Brooklyn], my father was born and raised in Harlem. So that’s even more complicated thanGrowing up, my food life was very involved with the fact that my mother did not like doing home cooking. My mother, born in 1930, she was one of those women—that home-cooking thing was work and she was not going to do that. However, my grandmother, my father’s mother, lived with us. My mother was born and raised in Bed-Stuy [in Brooklyn], my father was born and raised in Harlem. So that’s even more complicated than the Bronx-Harlem relationship. That was an intermarriage! Okay! When my parents got married in ’63, that was a big deal. So my mother, not interested in home cooking, she was good with the Stouffer’s, the TV dinners, we could have fast food. All of it. Because that was all freeing for her. My grandmother, however, who came to this country from Jamaica in the ’20s, she worked as a domestic worker, primarily in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse.

The OG New York Fifth Avenue.

Exactly. She worked a little bit on the Upper West Side, but her families were mostly in the South Bronx. So much of the food that I grew up eating was food that she learned to cook in those kitchens, to cook for the families she worked for. Some of the names of the things were wrong because they came through her Jamaican. It was only years later that I’d be like, Oh, that’s what that was.

Maybe that’s something that Ghetto Gastro is giving back to folks. It’s letting them claim their stories and themselves because by engaging in this community, in the culinary, you’re allowing others to claim a relationship to their individual journey, their family history.

See recipes from Black Power Kitchen below.