Community Arts Initiative: Endless Feast

Over a seven-month period, young artists from the Museum’s ten Community Arts Initiative (CAI) partners in the Boston area collaborated with artist Rhonda Weppler to create a large-scale installation that explores the interconnection of food and culture.

Endless Feast presents a banquet of infinite scale, a surreal, epic, endless feast. Using candy, chocolate, icing, fondant, and food-safe silicone molds, the young artists made a variety of miniature tableware and food items, finding inspiration in objects from the MFA’s collection as well as in dishes enjoyed by their own culturally diverse families, such as Chinese egg tarts, Salvadorian enchiladas, and Jamaican rice and beans. Weppler then photographed this cornucopia and modified it with Photoshop, producing a large-scale photomural receding into space.

As a counterpoint to the immense photomural, each child made a small sculpture of a meal that he or she had eaten the day before, some of which have been enlarged to life scale by Weppler.

Endless Feast invites us to reflect on the day-to-day lives of the young artists. How do the objects displayed in museums speak to powerful forces of history and social conventions of taste? What can they tell us about individuals who felt hunger, enjoyed good food, and shared meals just as we do?

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.