Culinary Institute of America Opens Student-Curated Exhibit

From CIA: Over the course of this semester, students in The Culinary Institute of America's Food History class have been researching and curating a museum exhibit for the public. Through the use of primary texts, cultural artifacts, and multi-media, the students created "Cooking Up a Nation: [Im]migration and American Foodways," an exhibit showcasing many aspects related to historical and cultural intersections with the migration of people to America and the construction and changes of our foodways.Some explored themes include: pre-nation migrants from Europe and Africa and interactions with native peoples; the century of immigration from Europe and the Asia and how patterns of settlement and push-pull factors affected food practices and traditions; how national immigration policies corresponded with attitudes toward what constituted "Americans" and "American foods"; and the rise of a globalized palate across the American landscape. The students wrote interpretive and descriptive text to accompany each theme and produced multi-media components to introduce video and audio components to the exhibit.

An opening reception will be held in the Conrad N. Hilton Library on the CIA campus in Hyde Park on Tuesday, July 25th from 2:30–3:30 p.m. Student-curators will be on hand to answer questions about the exhibit. They will also be preparing and serving food from nations whose residents are currently banned from traveling to the United States.The exhibit will be on display in the Donald and Barbara Tober Exhibit Room in the Hilton Library until December 13, 2017. The hours are Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m., Friday 8:30 a.m.–7 p.m., and Saturday 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Both the exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

Image Courtesy of CIA