Food-focused exhibit at C.R. Museum of Art

If you weren’t hungry before viewing the new “Ravenous: Food in Art” exhibition at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, you will be afterward. And Julia Jessen, the museum’s curator of collections and exhibitions, hopes the food-focused display will whet your appetite for more.

With a still life by Marvin Cone, a kitchen worker by Grant Wood and a street food etching by Rembrandt, the nearly 30 pieces create a feast for the eyes in a variety of media and styles. They will be on view through May 5 in the second floor back gallery.

Several events will allow all ages to dig in on the topic, beginning with a free “Midnight Snack” Pajama Storytime at the museum from 7 to 8 p.m. Feb. 1, whipping up delicious stories for children and their adult companion, featuring guest reader and cricket farmer Shelby Smith, as well as food-themed artwork to make and take.

Then on Feb. 7, curator Jessen will lead an Art Bites discussion on the exhibition, from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. The next night, the public is invited to a free opening reception from 5 to 6:30 p.m., celebrating “Ravenous,” as well as the upcoming exhibitions “Land/Scape,” from Feb. 10 to May 19, and “Vessels,” from April 20 to March 30, 2025.

Stroll through another exhibition, “ROY G. BIV: A Rainbow of Art,” on view on the first floor through Oct. 27, and the hint of a food theme begins to waft through the galleries.

“Especially with ‘Ravenous,’ we think a lot about the land and where (the food is) coming from,” Jessen said. “ ... And so I think there are a lot of ways that they can tie in each other. ... There are actually quite a few landscapes in (’Ravenous’).”

The four exhibitions will overlap, “so people will have a lot of opportunity to see the parallels for themselves,” Jessen said.

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‘Ravenous: Food in Art’

“Food is essential to our survival. It is also one of the great pleasures in life. It is no surprise then that fruit, vegetables, meat, and drink have been common motifs in painting and sculpture throughout time. But there’s more to paintings of food than meets the eye,” museum officials said in announcing “Ravenous.”

“This exhibition explores representations of food in the permanent collection and the things it can tell us about society and culture. Through a wide variety of representations, multiple meanings are considered, and the importance of food in art becomes clear,” Jessen noted.

Executive Director Sean Ulmer added: “Food, while necessary for human survival, has long been associated with attributes beyond sustenance. Food, especially in art, has been symbolic of other characteristics such as purity, gluttony, avarice, wealth and abundance.

“(Jessen’s) careful selection from the appropriate works in our collection highlights many of these associations, as well as explaining the impact of a lack of food as seen in some works of art,” Ulmer added. “ ‘Ravenous’ is a revealing and engaging look at an important genre in the history of art.”

Food has been depicted for as long has art has existed, Jessen told The Gazette. Even in cave drawings, the artists were “thinking about those food sources, to getting those food sources — something that they were depicting, as well.”

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The theme was chosen before Jessen joined the staff in July. She had the option of moving forward with it or changing course. She decided to stay the course, and as she became acquainted with the museum’s permanent collection, discovered works showing not only food in the excepted still life works, but also depictions of people preparing or connecting with food, and people sitting down to have a meal.

“I thought it was a really interesting (theme),” she said, “something fun to explore and show our audience. I wanted to see what we could put together to show a variety of representations of food in art.”

She couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include one of museum’s Rembrandt holdings.

Doing so, “shows the strength of our collection — that we have real treasures and masterpieces in the collection,” she said. “It’s wonderful to be able to bring them out for different unexpected exhibitions, as well. I don’t know if everyone would expect to see this Rembrandt etching in an exhibition that’s all about food.”

She likes “being able to incorporate (such works) in unconventional ways to allow the visitors to experience them in a different way, and hopefully learn something new, or gain a different understanding than what they previously had.”

Visitors will see paintings, prints, 3D objects, photography, multimedia works, including one with a rock formation and test tubes. Some are realistic depictions, while others are more impressionistic.

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And a few that “express the idea of hunger,” she said. “I wanted to include that, as well, to make a contrast there between all of these representations — perhaps show a bountiful amount of food, and contrast that with a lack of food and absence of food — and really bring home that idea of ravenous and not having that bountiful expression of food that we had in those other works.”

The Rembrandt ties in multiple themes to create a snapshot of everyday life in the Netherlands in the 17th century. It’s a reproductive etching, meaning it was created later on from the original print.

Jessen described the piece as “a genre scene,” depicting a pancake maker working on the street. Street scenes were a popular subject in the Netherlands at that time, she added.

“And in the etching, a little boy is holding a pancake away from a dog trying to eat it,” she said, “so there’s a little bit of action going on there.”

While many such street scenes showed a more upper class, Jessen noted that Rembrandt “was very sensitive in his handling of those figures — a little more sympathetic representations of them than perhaps some of the other artists at the time.”

This Rembrandt etching also embraced the moralizing tone of street scenes, Jessen added, with “lessons they were trying to convey.”

The exhibition is arranged in groupings showing common threads, from fruits and vegetables to the process of handling food, moving on to table settings.

Jessen hopes viewers “get a sense of variety of how food is represented in art. I hope they learn a little bit more about the way you see food in different artworks. And I hope they start to notice it in that same way that I was noticing in choosing things for the exhibition.

“I think there’s a lot to see in the gallery. A lot has been put together all in one (space), and I think it provides a greater understanding of that topic.”

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‘ROY G. BIV’

Who is this obscure artist with works exhibited on the first floor?

He’s not an artist at all. He’s an acronym: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the colors of the rainbow and the color wheel many students encounter by middle school.

“That exhibition is all about color,” Jessen said. “It’s all about the ways that artists utilize color in their work; the choices that they make in relation to color; how color is used to create a mood or a tone in the work; or how color can be used to direct our attention, focusing in on a specific area of a work.”

Each wall displays a predominant color in the rainbow, with reds grouped together, then oranges, yellows and so on. She was running short on wall space, so she skipped indigo, but said some pieces in the blue and violet groupings lean toward indigo. A case in the middle contains 3D pieces in each rainbow color.

Among the 25 works from the museum’s permanent collection is a Grant Wood floral still life that figures prominently in the yellow grouping. Jessen said it’s also a nice transition piece, since Wood used some vibrant reds in the petals.

An especially eye-catching piece is John Buck’s “Phoenix Rising,” a whimsical woodblock print depicting a dodo bird set against a bright background that Jessen said is “really nice” for the red wall.

Arranging by color is “kind of an unusual way for us to display art,” she said. “It’s not something that we do often — just grouping things by color — which makes this kind of fun.”

And dramatic — just like a rainbow.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com