Three Generations Happy Family

My family owned a takeout restaurant in Kansas City, and my time there was a formative life experience. Unbeknownst to me as a child was that the Nelson Atkins Art Museum and Country Club Plaza, two cultural cornerstones of Kansas City, were only an eight minute drive away from our family restaurant.

This tri-fold menu unfolds to reveal a personal timeline, my family story told via food as a political and socioeconomic indicator. The menu offers an insight into what it means to enter the art world from a positionality that has been excluded from cultural authorship.

米 mǐ | uncooked rice is an installation based on representational disparities in the US arts industry. mǐ is about unfolding the emotional and personal core for why this data matters, to reveal that underneath the numbers are people's lives.

米 (mǐ) is the Chinese word for uncooked rice and other grains, a metaphor for that which could sustain us, but in its unprocessed form is indigestible.