Tracy Candido

Artist Files Fellow

Tracy Candido uses food to generate conversations about challenging topics in visual culture. For Sweet Tooth of the Tiger Candido made baked goods in her Brooklyn kitchen and sold them at inflated prices from a bake sale table at art galleries during the economic recession. This participatory event examined how the ideas of value and commodity shift within the context of the New York art gallery. Candido invited her audience to eat the desserts in order to draw a parallel between the eating of sweet food and the buying of contemporary art as a decadent, indulgent consumption, and affirmed the gallery’s capacity to transform the bake sale into a commodity. In conjunction with the Open Engagement Conference in Portland Oregon, Candido collaborated with two other artists to produce The Pub Discussion Series. The Series was designed to act as a bridge between the intellectual environment of the conference and the informal culture of the pub. Candido and her collaborators recognized the need to have smaller debriefing sessions outside of the formal setting of the conference to discuss the positions and questions they were forming in relation to their own practices. To fill this need, the artists created unofficial sessions in which attendees could talk informally about topics presented during the conference: art and education, community building, evaluation and documentation of the creative process. Candido’s Community Cooking Club is an ongoing collaborative cooking and eating event where participants prepare recipes from guest artists, authors and educators, and then eat what they have prepared together at a communal table. During the event, participants break into groups of 2-4 to work together to decipher different recipes, creating a menu of seasonal dishes. The Cooking Club functions as art because it offers a hands-on engagement among its participants, who learn from and with their peers in a direct, experiential way by sharing cooking skills and feeding one another. Candido’s practice is generous because it creates conversations and social connections by feeding people. She uses the social nature of food as a medium for building community and discourse around creative production.

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