The fall semester is underway, and incoming students can usually use some extra orienting material on how to function, well beyond where the academic advisor’s office is located and what hours the library is open.

Art school, if you work at it, can be way more taxing than maybe most people assume. You end up in the studio with all that youthful stamina, staying out till, like, 4 AM, covered in paint and probably coughing on the charcoal dust wafting in from the freshman drawing classes. Meals can be spotty, but they’re essential to surviving a last-minute productive blitz and the next day’s high-tension crit session.

So here’s a few sustaining snacks to get you through. They’re all low-responsibility, so you can make them easily and quickly without a lot of tools (like a stove or a blender or whatever). That way you can put them together even if you’re stuck in the studio building or live in a dorm or you’re just super busy with, you know, adding to culture. And almost all of these should fit any diet, since they’re meat-, milk- and flour-free, no added fat, low sugar, with few allergens to avoid — all that stuff. Plus they taste good.

The After School Snack
1 large pink apple (Fuji, Macintosh, Pink Lady, etc.)
About 3 Tbsp Nut butter of choice (peanut butter is great, but if you want to get really gourmet about it you can use almond or cashew butter)
1 Tbsp Honey or agave nectar
1/2 tsp lemon juice
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Prepare ahead of time or clear a space in the studio so you aren’t making food right next to a wet painting or your laptop. Using (preferably) a Victorinox Swiss army knife, cut the apple into slices, discarding the seeds and core stuff. Toss in lemon juice and cinnamon until evenly coated. Lump the peanut butter on top and then drizzle with honey. Alternatively, you can put the peanut butter in the middle of a bowl or plate and then fan the apple slices around the edge, dipping then into the honey like a chip dip.

Iced Coffee
3/4 cups coarse-ground coffee
4 cups cool water

In a jar cover coffee with cool water. Close and leave in the fridge overnight, at least 12 hours. Strain with a colander. Dilute as desired and pour over ice and add whatever you like with your coffee. It’s going to be rocket-fuel strong, but unlike chilling hot coffee it won’t get bitter and it won’t get so watered down with the ice. And it’s way cheaper than buying it at the local coffee place or cafeteria or whatever, so you’ll have more cash to blow on whatever art students buy… Cocktails I guess.

Chocolate Chia Pudding
1 1/2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1/3 cup chia seeds
1/4 cup cacao or unsweetened cocoa powder
2-5 Tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

Add all ingredients except sweetener to a mixing bowl and whisk vigorously to combine. Sweeten to taste with maple syrup. Let rest covered in the fridge overnight or at least 3-5 hours (or until it’s achieved a pudding-like consistency). Serve chilled with desired toppings, such as fruit, granola or coconut whipped cream.

Put some goji berries on it, or bananas, or pecans, or, like, raspberry jam or something. Go totally nuts.

Guacamole
1 medium avocado
1 lime
Torn-up cilantro (optional)
Salt to taste

Juice the lime and mash it up with the avocado, with the cilantro if you use it. This should come out a rich cadmium green, with the fluffy texture if cheap oil paint (think Richeson brand). Eat it with chips, obviously, or by the spoonful of you really, really like avocados.

Cold Oats
1/3 cup regular oats
1 cup almond milk, and more if needed
1-2 Tbsp chia seeds
1 ripe banana, peeled and smashed
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract

Mix ingredients in a bowl and place in fridge overnight. Like the chia pudding you can add all sorts of stuff, like dried mangoes, or blueberries with pecans and maple syrup, or whatever kind of color/flavor combinations your palate digs.

Green Tea Mousse
400gm silken tofu
3 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 1/2 Tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp matcha green tea powder
1 tsp amchoor (dried mango powder, optional)

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whip together until smooth. Makes four servings. Put some strawberries or raspberries or roasted nuts on it if you like them. Pine nuts are great.

Fresh Vegetables
Cucumber with salt and pepper
Celery with peanut butter and raisins
Tomatoes with Spike seasoning
Haricot vert, with the tips removed
Carrots, bell peppers, olives and/or kale with hummus

And plus just a lot of nuts and fruit and stuff are always good to keep on hand.

These are freshman-level recipes. More advanced sophomore and junior-level culinary aesthetes can experiment with some actual cooking, baking and even fermentation.

The post Back to School Special: Recipes for Artists and Students appeared first on artcritical.

There’s ever a sense of dailiness in Nguyen’s poems, which are full of life — right now as well as the past. Reading these poems one imagines her dancing around the house or office or grocery store, thinking and feeling these curious things — in the same way that, while you read them, the words arrive as if dancing along the page to have you perceive them just so. You can hear laughing, cooking, talking or sometimes yelling; you can smell, taste, and see the poems as they change. With the common basis of technical experience — our language — it’s a rare treat to read the work of a poet who is so in control and yet loves language enough to let it do new things. Even rarer is the chance to get to talk dinner with someone like this.

Paul Maziar: How can we think of recipes in the context of myth, song, and poetry that gets passed on from one generation to the next, and does this aspect of food (or recipe) inspire in a similar way that the poem can?

Hoa Nguyen: Your question brings to mind the mythological symbol of the ouroboros, the tail devouring snake. It is the symbol for sustaining life, infinity, cycles and renewal, and creation out of destruction. The need to eat to live.

Recipes are about taste combinations: the right proportions of flavors and textures, a mouth feel. That really does sound like what I’m after in poems and what I see in the songs I love — harmony (or discordance), layering, variety, and how it lands in the body.

I also think of recipes, and sharing them as a transference of deep hearth knowledge, hearths tended by women.

That sounds like what you’re after to me, and it’s why I thought to talk recipe with you. I’m now thinking of tradition. What have been some of the major influences on your recipe-gathering?

When I moved to Austin in the mid-‘90s, I was introduced to poet Ronald Johnson’s cookbook The American Table (Silver Spring Books: 1984). In his acknowledgements and introduction he talks about how, over decades, he had clipped recipes from little spiral-bound cookbooks, newsletters, and church gazettes or written down recipes after having been invited into the kitchens of a renowned neighborhood chef here or cook friend there.

This resonated with something that Joanne Kyger said to me years before. She said from Robert Duncan she received a transmission of knowledge on the “religion of the household,” that he “unabashedly made a wonderful magical home.” I was sitting on her porch when she told me this and remember how that knowledge settled inside of me, astonishingly. A few years ago, she recalled that moment too — that she could see the clarity of her statement reach me.

So I think of nourishing meals as that kind of magic, the magic of keeping a home hearth and consider how the hearth acts as a place for other kinds of energy transference. It’s partly why our Skanky Possum Presents reading series has been held in our home. Food is part of that scene, as are music, candles, books, conversations, laughing, and flowers.

The link between you and Joanne Kyger seems a rich one. First coming to her work, her apparent sense of dailiness is motivating. It seems like the activities of the everyday, like writing poems and cooking, are both ordinary and sacred at the same time. Do you see this as the merging of art and life? Incidentally, I just passed over your quotation from Kerouac, “swimming in a sea of English,” used as an epigraph for your “Birthday Poem,” which seems in keeping with something Kyger wrote about “bathing in the poem.”

I love how you phrase that, both ordinary and sacred at the same time. In a review of Kyger’s selected poems, As Ever (Penguin: 2002), Dale Smith wrote, “the distinctions between self, body and landscape, and God and domestic gods of place blend into the vibrant fabric of every day.” What I learned from Kyger’s work is that those distinctions are fluid (to extend the bathing metaphor). It’s part of the richness of experience and they texture the poems.

This is perfect. Trying to find the Kyger bathing line, as you go between laundry, this interview, and making dinner, I’ve come back to “The Pigs for Circe in May”:

I almost ruined the stew and Where

is my peanut butter sandwich I tore through the

back of the car

I could not believe

there was One slice of my favorite brown bread and my
stomach and

I jammed the tin foil and bread wrappers into

the stew

and no cheese and I simply could not believe

and you Never

TALK when my friends are over.

This is known as camping in Yosemite.

Already I wish there was something done.

Odysseus found a stag on his way to the ship

I think of people sighing over poetry, using it,           I

don’t know what it’s for.”

Do you memorize your recipes, going from intuition and spontaneity, or do you adhere to a guide?

You quote one of my favorite early poems by Kyger! Her use of myth in feminist modern retellings is one of the influences I cite as I think about a new project that I’m forming — this in addition to her attention to and writings on place, and her biography of Madam Blavatsky in verse.

I forgot to mention I’m also running around trying to get ready for a reading tonight in Toronto, writing a grant proposal for a project, AND making stock out of the chicken roast we had on Sunday night. I’m making ph? gà from it.

What’s the project you mention?

It’s a book of poems; part verse meditation and part documentary poetry on 1960s Vietnam. The narrative will include a verse biography of my mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, and investigate historical, personal, and cultural pressures of the time. I consider it a project that I’ve been gearing up to do for 20 years.

I’ve read a little about your amazing mother in an interview you gave last October, and I’m very excited about your biography. And I wonder, was the aforementioned ph? gà recipe handed down or gleaned from your mother?

I’m fortunate to have access to living first-person narratives and that my mother is more and more willing to share stories from this period in Vietnam and of her childhood, growing up on a Mekong Delta farm in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I also have letters that my father wrote home to his family in Minneapolis from 1967 to 1969, as well as family photographs, though some of latter are lost due to rupture.

My mother didn’t learn to cook Vietnamese food growing up, because, the story goes, when she entered the kitchen as a girl, things would break or something would burn; this was considered most unlucky! And so she was discouraged from working in the kitchen. I’ve invented all of my Vietnamese recipes based on instructions found in cookbooks or online and from experimentation guided by meal memory (and yes, intuition, as you mention earlier). Which I guess rhymes with the challenge I am facing in my developing project; when one lacks a direct link between past and present, you have to do some delving, intuiting, and inventing.

By the former criteria, my kitchen must be the unluckiest! The analogy between your project and recipe-invention is a good one; gleaning from history to make something now (not necessarily new) is great — a recipe for interesting, surprising results. If you and I were to sit down to enjoy some ph? gà this evening, how would you go about preparing it?

When I was a girl, I used to pore through a 1950s Betty Crocker three-ring-bound recipe book that my mother had (was probably given when she settled in her home in suburban Maryland) and especially remember this entry. I was horrified by it! It’s a liver-sausage pineapple. The recipe is here if you are tempted to try it.

When I think of the cuisine of South Vietnam that my mother left behind in 1969, I can’t help but wonder what she made of that recipe for a meat-covered jar in the shape of a pineapple!

So, here, in contrast to that meat pineapple is a picture of ph? gà:

The chicken soup recipe I am sharing is a very simplified version. I designed it as a recipe that I could make even if I was dog-sick with the flu (this soup is amazing medicine as well as being delicious).

The blog Eat4Fun has a great recipe that is also simple (but contains more steps than mine below) and closer to traditional. It is also the source for the photo above.

Easy Ph? Gà For What Ails You

Broth
2 boxes organic chicken broth or homemade equivalent (always superior to boxed)
Shallots or onions, minced
Garlic, minced
Cilantro stems
Fresh ginger grated
1 star of anise
Dash of soy sauce
Dash of fish sauce
½ teaspoon sugar (palm is traditional) or rice syrup
Vermicelli rice noodles prepared to package instructions

Additions
Shredded chicken
Bean sprouts
Cilantro and basil
Scallions/red onions
Hot sauces/peppers
Limes

Directions
Over medium heat, soften onions in vegetable oil (coconut oil is best); as it softens, add garlic.

Once both are soft and fragrant, add broth, cilantro stems (coriander), anise, and ginger. Let simmer on low for 20 minutes. It will smell amazing. Remove star of anise and stems — you can also pass the broth through a sieve to remove all other solids for a more elegant soup.

To serve, arrange piles of rice noodles into soup bowls. To these add a generous squeeze of lime, fresh cilantro (rau r?m if you have some), basils (Thai basil is great here), scallions or red onion, shredded meat, and bean sprouts. Ladle on the broth. Add slices of fresh hot peppers or prepared hot sauce of your choice.

The post Poetry and Pho: Hoa Nguyen Shares Lyricism and a Recipe appeared first on artcritical.

Todd Mauritz, founder and director of M23 Project Space, recently hosted a cocktail party for friends, including gallery artist Daniel Herr. After badgering everyone I could think of for summer recipes, Mauritz was the only one gracious enough to oblige me, which he happily did. In between drinks and pizza, we talked about the Kennedy assassination, art, politics of the past 15 years, Mauritz’s recent trip to Shelter Island, and the surprisingly temperate weather we’ve had in New York all summer.

M23 maintains a project space uptown, but has also held experimental offsite exhibitions in Brooklyn, Miami, London, and the Chelsea Hotel. Mauritz explained his project space in this way:

I’ve been doing M23 for three years. We’ve done a couple of really fun things, some in collaboration with other people. We did an Armory after-party at The Hole NYC in 2012, working with ArtStation. Then, the following August, Matt Maust and Sam Owens approached me to have a show at Danese. At that point I decided to make a bigger go at it.

I’d worked for a few galleries before that, and I learned a lot about the business, so it seemed like kind of a no-brainer. I was preparing to leave and had a temporary space already. I named the project M23 for a lot of reasons: my name is Mauritz, but I’m shy and don’t want or like it to be about me, like “Mauritz Projects” or something. The M23 is the bus to Chelsea and I lived on 23^rd Street. M23 is a guerrilla group and the things we’ve done have been guerrilla, insurgent-style events. It’s also a motorway out of London, a male-to-female cable-connector, and a type of semi-automatic pistol. So the title came loaded with all these powerful allusions.

Daniel Herr: So why did you decide to make it a project space instead of a more traditional white-cube gallery? Or is it a kind of hybrid? How did that come about?

Mauritz: It kind of happened quickly and what I’m doing is, I think, kind of a response to the way that the market is changing so quickly. Part of it was noted in that “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show” essay — clients don’t even need to come into the gallery anymore, but you still need a space to create your vibe. You can create your vibe online, like I do with my Twitter and Instagram posts, but you still need that space where you can show people that you’re organizing and hanging beautiful shows and that people are showing up and taking you seriously. So part of my business model is to have three or four big events each year, in addition to the exhibitions. I still plan to have a regular exhibition schedule, but I think having too much can kind of burn out your base. So I aim for that and for maintaining mobility.

Noah Dillon: You move around a lot and do a lot of your events outside of the project space, right?

Herr: But the first one was at the Chelsea Hotel.

Mauritz: That’s right; that was the first official M23 event. The project had been going for about a year, but I wanted to mark the gallery’s initiation and have it born at the Chelsea Hotel. A photographer named Tim Nazzarro approached me for the launch of his book No Bad Faith (2013), which had as its subject Liza Thorn. She was Courtney Love’s protégé and had been the muse for several fashion houses, including Yves Saint Laurent, and she had a band called Starred. So it felt like a good fit and the hotel jumped at the chance to sponsor the event. We had security people with black suits and earpieces, and it looked really official. And they work with Nadine Johnson PR, which was great and started a relationship with them; we’re looking forward to future events with them.

Herr: It was a really good turnout. That place was packed. I felt obliged to Instagram the pre-war-era tub overflowing with empty Heinekens.

Dillon: Yeah, I remember that. There was a video, and the space was under construction so it gave it a kind of punk rock flavor.

Mauritz: After that we had an event in London. We wanted to make it event- and artist-driven, bringing the art to where people would be interested rather than waiting for them to come to the gallery space. At the Ace Hotel we installed a permanent mural by Matt Maust, which debuted during Frieze. (It’s also where I stole these tumblers we’re drinking from.)

[laughing]

The space was small, so we limited attendance to RSVPs and we had about 30 amazing galleries, curators, and artists show up. We served duty-free Hendrick’s gin and we’d produced a making-of video and projected it in the room during the reception. It was dark, everyone was ginned-up, and it felt really intimate and sensitive. The room the piece was installed in wasn’t completed, so they had us on a second floor and someone from the hotel was working with me. They gave us a key so we could take people downstairs, a few at a time, and let them into the space so they could see it in a really personal way. Coming from my previous gallery experience the whole thing felt totally surreal: I’m in London, at Frieze, people are showing up here, and we’re doing something that isn’t done in a normal gallery but works really well.

In Miami, the collector Craig Robins set us up with a space in the Design District, where we did a show called “Video Vaudeville.” I brought a projector in my bag and showed videos in a suite there. Francis Alÿs let me show his 1997 video Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), where he pushes a block of ice around Mexico City until it melts completely.

Dillon: That’s a great video.

Mauritz: Yeah, I was really happy that he gave me permission, which lent it some cred. And it’s so perfect for Miami.

We participated in “Pyramid Scheme,” a group of shows with curators selecting curators who organized simultaneous exhibitions under one umbrella program. We did the first one in Brooklyn and are going to do another one in Los Angeles. In October I’m going back to Frieze, but I’d like to hold an M23 event in Berlin for a couple of weeks prior to that. I’m really excited by the itinerant nature of our programming. And I’m really proud of the events and we’ve had really great crowds. But with my social media work, with people following me on Twitter and Instagram…

Herr: You’ve got like 5000 followers on Twitter, and the Times says at least 70% of them are likely to be actual people!

I’m into the social media and web presence that you’ve developed. You seem really careful about curating it. Sometimes people can let it get out of hand.

Mauritz: Yeah, and with that I’ve found that I’ve got as many followers in London as I do in New York. I never got this stuff, never had a Facebook page or anything, but it’s been really great in building the brand. The physical space, which I kind of stumbled into, is a beautiful old French-style apartment. It’s packed with work and people can come and see the work. As cool as the event-driven nature of the project has been, I’d like to make a bigger commitment to developing the space as a locus for all this work. The artists that I work with — like Daniel, who I am such a fan of — I am really happy to have their work and have been very selective. I thought, How is he not a huge star?

Herr: Because I haven’t reached my Jesus Year.

[laughing]

But I’m honored to be included in the space. I think the programming is really solid. It’s cool the idea that you can get this group of artists together that make really different kinds of work and then grow from that, instead of getting a space and then trying to decide who to show.

Are you doing something in Miami this year?

Mauritz: I’ve already got my ticket, but I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it if I didn’t get in.

Dillon: Well, here’s hoping. Cheers!

Mezcal23 Cocktail

Ingredients:
Mezcal
Tequila
Triple Sec liqueur (Cointreau preferred)
Limes
Whole black peppercorns

Tools:
Shot glass
Cocktail shaker + strainer
Pepper mill or chef’s knife to crack peppercorns

-Juice the limes and set aside
-In the cocktail shaker start with 3 parts of your favorite tequila using a shot glass to measure
-Add 2 parts Cointreau (or another triple sec) and one part fresh limejuice
-Add ice and shake for 20 seconds
-Using the strainer, pour the mix into an 8 – 12 oz glass over ice (depending on your glass you may want to use large ice cubes)
-Top the cocktail with one part Mezcal, which should be at room temperature and poured slowly so that it floats on top of the cold drink
-Add cracked black pepper to taste and garnish with a slice of lime on the glass’s rim
-Most importantly, be sure to multiply the formula to accommodate all of your guests — sharing is important

Enjoy!

M23 Project Space is at 61 West 74^th Street. Todd Mauritz tweets at @m23co and can be found on Instagram at mauritz228. The gallery’s website is m23.co

Daniel Herr is an artist living and working in Brooklyn.

The post Mezcal23: Todd Mauritz’s Summer Cocktail Recipe appeared first on artcritical.