The Fall River Arts & Culture Coalition (FRACC) and New Bedford Creative invite the community to join MassMoCA artist-in-residence Sammy Lee for an art-popup of A Very Proper Table Setting.
Tuesday, 7/19 from 3 PM - 5 PM: Serenity Gardens, Bedford St, New Bedford, MA (outside, open to all, no need to RSVP, and part of Coastal Foodshed's Mobile Farm Stand)
Tuesday, 7/19 from 6 PM - 8 PM: Interwoven, 634 Pleasant St, New Bedford, MA (inside, open to all, please RSVP, at Rhonda M. Fazio's Interwoven gallery and maker space)
Wednesday, 7/20 from 10 AM - 12 PM: @portugalia_marketplace , Bedford St, Fall River, MA (inside, open to all, no need to RSVP)
"A Very Proper Table Setting" is a project that invites participants to serve imagined meals to living and deceased loved ones using Korean dishes.
The project begins with a series of experiments centering around setting tables. Lee invites visitors to arrange imaginary meals for a loved one using Korean dinnerware. When participants conceive a specific dish from their culture and cannot find a suitable serving vessel, they experience feelings common amongst newly settled immigrants, such as inadequacy to fit into the mainstream culture or inability to represent their customs properly.
Many participants who used a past relationship to inspire their exercise found the process of healing through the universal act of setting the table. Many experienced disorientation, rapport, adaptation, and a sense of community through memories of a loved one. In the final art piece, these unique personal narratives displayed through each table setting will come together as a large community dining table. The quiet power of Very Proper Table Setting rests in its engagement of our caring and restorative impulses at a time when almost any issue can further splinter partisan divides. studiosmlk.com
"Very Proper Table Setting is inspired by my own experience of searching seven years for a bowl in which to serve my family's noodle soup recipe. My goal is to create a safe and empathic place to explore how cultural adaption can take root in curiosity rather than careless appropriation." -- Sammy Seung-Min Lee
Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is recently a resident artist at Redline, serves as an Asian Art at Denver Art Museum ambassador, and operates a contemporary art project and residency space, called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver. Lee's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid.
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