Food, so essential to life, is more than its physical parts; it is a reflection of our shared human experience. For artists, food is a copious source
of visual and symbolic inspiration.

The intricate link between food and art is one that spans cultures, time and place. Throughout the centuries, artists have been attracted to food as a subject and often used it metaphorically: water represented sustenance of life; pomegranates,
hope and eternal life; and, the still lifes of the Dutch masters, so gloriously overflowing with fruit, game, fish and fowl, symbolized the abundance of Holland’s thriving economy in the 17th century

Today’s artists employ a variety of media – including edible materials themselves – to explore food as a metaphor for human relationships and society’s challenges, and sometimes as a critique of contemporary culture.

In Consuming Passion, thirteen artists use food imagery with a variety of intentions: to provide a peek into our domestic settings and to provoke questions about what is really happening during an everyday moment, to express concerns about threats to our environment, to celebrate the sumptuousness of our organic riches, to alert us to the delicacy and the fertility of symbolic foods, to comment on human consumption, and to employ food to illustrate and to evoke human emotion. For others, imaging food provides abundant visual structures through which to solve challenges of exploring line, color, pattern and space.

It is our hope as curators that this exhibition will allow you, the viewers, to pause for a moment, to see anew and to enjoy food from a fresh perspective.

Concord Art Association is pleased to present the work of the thirteen artists in this exhibit: 
Niels Burger
David Frazer
Judith Klausner
Elizabeth Kostojohn
Hannah Perrine Mode
Judith Motzkin
Joyce Utting Schutter
Tara Sellios
Elizabeth Slayton
Judith Solomon
Jessica Straus
Kathleen Volp 
Sue Yang  

Curated by
Merill Comeau, Ilana Manolson and Deborah Plunkett