This Performance Art Piece Is Being Served Up With Tasty, Warm Bowls of Curry

The graphite images on the stark white gallery walls show images of pain and protest, death and marching. Some of the scenes are familiar, historic and even iconic images from Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 March on Washington to the Million Man March ; the suffragists to the Women’s March; all alongside grislier scenes of Taiwanese uprisings.

In the middle of the room, almost antithetic to the strife, are nurturing bowls of curry, given to each viewer in the museum who wants one, allowing visitors to eat, consider and perhaps to talk with one another about the swirl of events so vividly displayed around them.

If Rirkrit Tiravanija ’s new piece at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is actually performance art, some of the performers must be the visitors who consume the tasty Thai cuisine, as well as the local muralists who continue to toil on the wall images, using overhead projectors, scaffolding and charcoal.

Tiravanija has used shared food in his work for three decades. The Argentine-born, Canadian-trained artist has provided communal meals in work dating to Untitled Empty Parenthesis in 1989, and Untitled (Free) in 1992. His 1999 piece Untitled went a bit further, inviting people to live in a gallery replica of his East Village artist.

For his ( who’s afraid of red, yellow and green ), first exhibited in Bangkok in 2010 and acquired by the Hirshhorn in 2017, Tiravanija has a popular local restaurant, Beau Thai, to prepare and present three curries—red, yellow and green.

The colors refer to political groups at odds in contemporary Thailand—the red for the rural activists, the yellow for the royalists and the green for the ever-pervasive military. But the title also is a reference to a series of paintings that the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman completed from 1966 to 1970, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue , a couple of which were defaced by those claiming it perverted the colors of the German flag.

But apart from all those references, Tiravanija says, the three colors represent the three basic curries, nourishing food for the belly while contemplating the images’ food for thought.

Food is served during lunchtime Thursdays through Sundays through July 24 to the first 150 or so comers, or until supplies are exhausted. Including warm food as part of an exhibition presented a new set of challenges for the museum, director Melissa Chiu says. There was no way they could allow the open flame used in previous stagings of the piece, for example.

But she says she’s “excited to introduce Tiravanija’s interactive culinary experience to the Washington, D.C. community” with a piece that “offers new perspectives on the ways in which art and creativity are used to interpret political and social issues of our time.”

It’s not often that galleries gather ephemeral works involving food, community and drawings, she says.

As the wall text indicates, viewers “are invited to look, smell and taste as the artist asks us to consider the unpalatable facts of history alongside the communal, domestic and universal act of sharing food.”

Wearing a John Deere cap and mingling among the food lines and artists’ scaffolds soon after the opening, Tiravanija, 57, says that when he first created (who’s afraid of red, yellow and green) in Bangkok, “society felt very fractured—even between artists.”

He had been collecting newspaper images of protests that seemed to have exploded worldwide since the War in Iraq began. He paid special attention to the uprisings in Thailand this century that drew a brutal response.

He gives free reign to locally hired artists in drawing the wall images. While students were enlisted other places, though, some of the city’s most esteemed muralists were engaged to draw much more sure-handed political images—a process that will continue as long as the work is on display.

“The idea is to draw over other images and layer it until the wall will become completely black,” Tiravanija says. “It will become more layered and complex, but eventually everything will be so covered, people will forget.”

And in a setting where people enjoy the same food, perhaps they can eventually share similar ideas, he says.

It certainly gives a new meaning to consuming art. Rarely has an exhibition been so literally nourishing.

The installation includes a couple of rooms of documentary films (where food, as in the rest of the museum, is not allowed). One, directed by Tiravanija, is a long, languid look at rural life in Thailand, Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors . A second room has a series of documentary shorts from 2004 to 2017 curated for the museum by Thai independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul , who’s film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the 2010 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or.

The short films, made from 2004 to 2017, reflect the social and political scene in contemporary Thailand. One concerns a mother’s laments after losing a son in a protest. Another collects images from Thai soap operas; another shows young men exchanging ideas, a third shows how the city comes to a halt as the national anthem is played nightly.

The museum held a special screening June 8 of a U.S. film chosen by Tiravanija, the 1963 The Ugly American , starring Marlon Brando as an ambassador who travels to a Southeast Asian country where he views conflicts as communism vs. democracy, but fails to detect the underlying complexity.

“It’s a film I saw as a child, showing how politics can be manipulated,” Tiravanija says.

Of the multi-media approach, though, it is the four-day lunch line that is something new for the Hirshhorn, says Mark Beasley, the museum’s curator of media and performance art. But it’s also relatively new practice to acquire a performance piece at all. When the piece closes on July 24, the walls will be whitewashed again for the next exhibition. And the written plans for the piece will be neatly filed away until it is staged again.

“Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow and green)” continues through July 24 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Food is served from 11:30 a to about 1:30 Thursday through Sundays, or until supplies run out.

How History Records the Peculiar Role of America’s First Ladies

The job of First Lady is rarely sought-after by the office holder. The position comes with no official duties. And Americans’ widely diverse expectations of what they want from a First Lady makes it an especially fraught occupation. Some 55 women have made the best out of what being married—or related to—the President demanded, but they weren’t always recognized as important people in their own right—and thus, subjects for portraiture.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is seeking to right that wrong, with the exhibition, “ Every Eye is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States ,” now on view through May 2021. The museum also began commissioning portraits of First Ladies in 2006, “with an eye to the future, so [it] would never again be the case,” that these women were not properly represented, says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the show’s curator and a senior historian at the museum.

The Portrait Gallery is also answering the call of visitors to its presidential portrait gallery, who have clamored for an exhibition devoted to these women. The museum plans to eventually have a permanent display of First Lady portraits to complement the presidents’ gallery.

The 60 portraits—photographs, drawings, silhouettes, paintings and sculpture—memorabilia, and garments, from Martha Washington to Melania Trump, were borrowed from multiple sources, including the National First Ladies Library , various presidential libraries and private collections. About a dozen are from the White House, where they were kept out of public view.

“We literally could not have done the exhibition without them,” says Kim Sajet, the National Portrait Gallery’s director.

Some First Ladies were frequently featured in art works and have been the subject of speculation, fascination and sometimes unwanted attention. “Every Eye is Upon Me” is taken from a letter that Julia Gardiner Tyler, wife of 10th President John Tyler, sent to her mother in 1844, acknowledging that she understood that her every move would be subject to scrutiny.

Others were almost invisible, either literally or figuratively.

There are no verifiable surviving painted portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln. The show depicts her through an 1861 Albumin silver print from the studio of Washington, D.C. photographer Matthew Brady. In the photograph, she is wearing a flower-bedecked headband and an off-the-shoulder hoop-skirted floral-printed dress, reflecting her love of couture. Lincoln bought many dresses from, and formed a close bond with, the Washington-based dressmaker and former slave Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, who had purchased her way to freedom using the money she’d earned with her sewing skills. Post-Civil War, Lincoln raised money for Keckley’s Contraband Relief Association, which assisted newly-freed people in Washington.

No representations exist at all of Margaret Taylor, wife of the 12th president Zachary Taylor. Before her husband came to Washington, Taylor had raised 10 children amidst frontier life in Army forts. She declined to take on the hostess role of the First Lady—perhaps because she was just tired, says Shaw. First Lady duties were instead assumed by the Taylors’ daughter, Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor Bliss Dandridge.

The portraits on display are as varied as the women themselves. Some are full-length formal oil paintings showing resplendent woman dressed luxuriously and posed against elegant settings, such as the one of Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison, wife of the 23rd president, Benjamin Henry Harrison. In the 1894 oil painting by Daniel Huntington, Harrison’s regal stature is marked by the folds of her satin dress and the coif of her hair.

“As she left office, she really asserts control over how her name and how her power will be used,” says Shaw, noting that the college-educated Harrison insisted that if Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore wanted her financial help to establish a medical school, it had to admit women.

“This is the kind of move we see first ladies making as the 19th century begins to close where they start to assert that cultural capital that they’ve developed in the White House,” Shaw says.

Helen Herron Taft is also depicted in an elaborately-framed full-length 1910 oil painting. Taft was an enthusiastic First Lady, having pushed her husband William Howard Taft to position himself for the eventual nomination. An avid gardener, Taft had 3,000 Japanese cherry trees planted along the Tidal Basin in Washington. In her portrait, as she sits jauntily among exotic plants, the White House can be seen peeking from behind her right shoulder. Taft is wearing a white, body-clinging silk gown with a plunging neckline and elaborate sheer silk wrap.

Taft was the first to donate her inaugural ball gown to the Smithsonian Institution, which helped establish the First Ladies dress collection , now housed at the National Museum of American History.

The exhibition features four garments worn by First Ladies: a short cape worn by Mary Lincoln and made by her go-to designer, Keckley; one of Jackie Kennedy’s tailored suits; Nancy Reagan’s second inaugural gown, by James Galanos; and the dress by Michelle Smith (Milly) that Michelle Obama wore for her official portrait, which is also part of the show.

The outfits in the show are placed next to each other in five-sided clear jewelbox displays that provide 360 degree views. The display—which also gives visitors sight lines to each of those four First Ladies’ portraits—affords a sense of the differing body sizes and heights of those women, says Shaw. The arrangement also allows “visitors to imagine themselves physically in relation to these First Ladies,” she says.

Each garment speaks to some aspect of the women’s personalities and philosophy, says Shaw. For instance, contrary to popular belief, Kennedy’s suits were not expensive French originals. She had Chez Ninon, a New York-based dressmaker copy the Chanel suits and other French designs she loved, acquiring them at a much lower price.

Obama’s dress was cotton poplin, a simple fabric accessible to most Americans. It speaks to certain values that “Mrs. Obama took up as a sartorial style that she became well known for,” says Shaw. The curator will further explore the power and representations of First Ladies’ clothing in a conversation with designer Michelle Smith on December 15.

The portraits are not all pomp and circumstance, however. Many reflect a down-home or less-sophisticated vibe or have a less-formal look.

The simple pastel showing only a shoulders-up portrait of Rosalynn Carter that was done in 1976 by Robert Clark Templeton could pass for a study for a more formal work. Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter, wears a mock turtleneck and a tied silk scarf—emblematic of the understated “just folks” approach she and her husband brought to the White House.

Lou Henry Hoover, portrayed in a 1928 photograph by Edward Steichen, wears her white-gray hair in a bob and her unadorned long-sleeved dress is marked only with a sailor collar. Hoover spoke many languages, including Mandarin, was highly educated and defied segregationists by hosting the African American wife of a congressman for tea at the White House. The photo was published in Vogue . It was the first time a First Lady had ever been featured.

“Every Eye Is Upon Me” and its accompanying catalogue, researched and written by Shaw, often reveal nuggets that Americans might not have learned in history class. In 1885, Grover Cleveland assumed the presidency as a bachelor. He asked his sister, Rose Elizabeth “Libby” Cleveland to take on First Lady duties, which she agreed to, even though she was already an accomplished novelist and editor. Rose only stayed for a year—and then, in 1889, began a relationship with Evangeline Marrs Simpson, a wealthy married woman. Rose Cleveland and Simpson became life partners and moved to Tuscany, Italy, where they are buried side by side.

Grover Cleveland married in 1886, at age 48, taking as his wife a 21-year-old Frances Folsom. She was the daughter of his deceased law partner and had been his ward since her birth. Apparently, the public did not look askance at this relationship. Instead, it embraced and worshiped her, says Shaw. The featured portrait, by Anders Zorn, shows a 35-year-old Cleveland—wearing no jewelry—seated, hands clasped, with her ivory silk off-the-shoulder gown practically blending into the ivory background.

The show also includes a video installation that loops photographs of First Ladies since the 1970s by Anne Leibowitz. The women in these pictures are loose, at home, casual and winking. It’s a great addition that highlights the diversity of the First Ladies and the dichotomies of their lives.

“For me this has been such an interesting journey of discovery,” says Shaw. “I had no idea how diverse they were until I began this project, and how self-possessed and ambitious and smart so many of them were.”

“ Every Eye is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States ” is now on view through May 2021 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The museum is open but visitors must obtain free, timed-entry passes prior to arrival.

Why Spoken Word Artist Regie Cabico Calls Himself an ‘Accidental Poet’

Regie Cabico offers advice on tackling his craft. “If you don’t know what to write, write a poem,” he says. “Things that you could never tell your mother, things you could never tell your father, and a lot will come out.” Cabico, who calls himself an “accidental poet,” specializes in slam poetry, a genre that requires performers to orate everything from original short stories to raps in just three passion-filled minutes. While Cabico’s performances have earned him awards at national poetry slams and representation in more than 30 anthologies, poetry wasn’t always his obvious calling.

Cabico grew up in a conservative Filipino-American family in Maryland, where his queer identity was rare in a mostly white and African-American neighborhood. Struggling to find a place in his community , he turned to theater as a space where he could explore self-expression. After graduating from NYU with a focus in acting, however, Cabico had difficulty booking roles. Desperation drove him to explore other ways of performing, like open mics or standup comedy, and he eventually stumbled into the emerging scene of poetry slams, a competitive performance where the audience acts as judge and critic.

“A poetry slam becomes poetry for the people decided by the people and so you’re changing your idea of what a poem can be because it’s happening live and it becomes a sport,” says Cabico. “People who find themselves at poetry slams are usually at the end of their rope,” he says. “And then they find a community and so it opens up so many doors.”

Cabico’s poems often address his experiences with racial discrimination or homophobia through subtly devastating lines like “…as a gust of cherry blossoms tumble on my skull.” In 2010, he founded Capturing Fire , a three-day international poetry festival for queer-identifying writers with the goal of encouraging more discussions and awareness about the queer experience.

Regie recently joined the Smithsonian's Sidedoor podcast host Lizzie Peabody for an in studio exclusive live performance and even offered some poetic cooking tips from the annals of American history.

This August, he will also be participating in the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. From August 2 through 4, writers will gather to share and expand knowledge about Asian-American literature with events including a queer “literaoke” (a combination of literary readings and karaoke) and readings of lesser-known poets who were influential in building the Asian-American literary culture.

The 2019 Asian American Literature Festival takes place at Eaton DC, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian's Freer|Sackler Galleries August 2 through August 4, 2019 in Washington, D.C. Regie Cabico will be performing at Verbal Fire: an Asian American Spoken Word Showcase on August 2, and at Queer Literaoke on August 3. Cabico will host Queerification: A Capturing Fire Asian American Reading of Queer Writers on August 4, 2019.