‘YES, CHEF’ Opens at Water Street Projects With a Dinner at Tavares Strachan’s Black Caesar

Last Saturday, the Water Street Association in Lower Manhattan unveiled a new multi-purpose exhibition space, Water Street Projects, by launching an ambitious year-long programming under the festival banner FEAST. This initiative celebrates culinary arts and their impact on other creative disciplines, including contemporary art, architecture and design, as well as music. To mark the opening, WSA hosted a dinner at Tavares Stretchan’s newly designed restaurant, Black Caesar. The event was attended by artists and prominent figures from the New York City art scene, and while Observer had the opportunity to speak with Water Street Project’s curator-at-large, Zoe Lukov, ahead of the opening, we gained additional insights about this new art space during the lively dinner conversation.

In recent years, Lukov has made a name for herself by curating non-traditional, experimental exhibitions that engage with pressing issues in real-time in Chicago, New York and international locations. The Water Street Association is a multidisciplinary space and platform, explained Ce Morales, who oversaw the show’s production, while savoring the fusion menu of North African and Roman Italian cuisine served at the Black Caesar event. WSA’s creative ecosystem of tenants focuses on FACT (fashion, art, culture and technology), and its new space aims to become, as stated on Instagram, a “new downtown hub blurring the lines of the arts, production, working space, food, play and culture.” The inaugural show, “YES, CHEF,” organized by Lukov, explores themes of food, power and ritual through large-scale contemporary works and several demanding site-specific commissions.

“The relation between food and art is nothing new, and many artists explore food in their practices, in various ways,” Lukov told Observer. “The expression ‘Yes, Chef’ has become popular in the last couple of years with all the cooking shows. Still, the phrase’s origins are interesting, as it originates from the French brigade-style kitchen, a direct descendant of the systematic military kitchen. The cheeky usage of the expression in common parlance speaks volumes about our relationship to power, domination and violence, particularly how those intersect with desire, consumption and nourishment.”

We are what we eat, someone once said, and with new technologies and changing lifestyles, it is increasingly clear how, as humans, we depend on food not only in a physical sense but also in relation to many intricate systems connecting us with others and society at large, especially in today’s global networks of trade, production and consumption. Many works on view at Water Street Projects express this tension between nurture and violence, care and consumption, exploitation and enjoyment while exploring the implications of food within a broader discourse of migration, global trade and colonialism. The show also addresses the dynamics and hierarchies of power and resource distribution. “It has everything to do with how we feed ourselves, how we care for ourselves, how we transmit information through our foodways and our culinary hybrids,” Lukov said.

One of the first works visitors encounter at the entrance sets the tone for the ambitious show: a series of large-scale transparent columns filled with peanut shells, where artist Jeffrey Merris addresses themes of migration, sustenance and the formulation of alternative economies. Further down the corridor, his video performance, Sugar, explores the new colonization driven by global trade, exemplified by the pervasive presence of Coca-Cola in countries that have altered their dietary habits, often not for the better. Equally impressive in scale and metaphor is Kiyan Williams’s monumental deep-fried American flag, which rethinks materials and American consumption habits while addressing the decay and rooting of patriotism and the American Dream. On a more playful note, Bony Ramirez’s painting of a young man in a lobster costume alludes to the exploitation of the Caribbean by the tourist economy. “‘YES, CHEF’ is both the erotic and visceral aspect of food and speaks to hierarchy and power,” Lukov explained. “There are lots of different layers of that.”

Notably, many of the invited artists, even those more recognized for their paintings, have created site-specific sculptural and installation-based interventions. This includes Chloe Wise, who has designed a series of sumptuous chandeliers transformed into raw bars with crudités, corn on the cob and Caesar salad. These pieces feature a deco design while also evoking an overly sauced notion of decadence. Similarly, Devin B. Johnson presents a large grouping of ceramic sweet potatoes, drawing connections to the ingredient’s history and its ties to colonial and trade routes that transported it from the African continent across the Atlantic.

Other significant works come from private collections, including a hanging sculpture by Camille Henrot. This piece engages with motherhood, using the symbolism of a mother’s milk to represent care, support and sacrifice in nourishing others. Additionally, the show features Henrot’s video work, Saturdays (2017), first presented at the Palais de Tokyo. This video explores the religious and anthropological connotations associated with the day, combining scenes recorded at SDA Church sites in the U.S., Polynesia and the Kingdom of Tonga with images of food, surfing and medical tests. Similarly, the video documentation of the 1991 performance by pioneering Chinese artist Zhang Huan, in which he wore a suit made of raw meat while walking the streets of New York City, addresses the silent violence of migrant discrimination, public space and the alienation that compels the body into a nearly beast-like masochism between consumption and decay.

“Most of the works are new and potentially less site-specific,” said Lukov. “Others come from loans but are very concept-specific for the show.” Given the scale of many works and the challenge of bringing them to the 5th and 6th floors, Water Street Projects must be operating with a considerable budget to support this and the rest of the ambitious year-long program. For instance, MOLD magazine and its founder, LinYee Yuan, have developed a public series exploring the exhibition’s themes of food and power, featuring artist conversations, readings and workshops that examine how food shapes our relationships with place and our understanding of ourselves.

A large number of the works on view interact with the architecture of the 40,000-square-foot cultural space, particularly in several double-height areas. One standout piece is Mango Tourist by Nari Ward, an alternative monument or anti-monument made from both found materials and perishable organic materials. This piece is embedded with thousands of dried mango seeds, alluding to regeneration and resilience even amidst the relics of civilization, thanks to nature’s endless cycle. Other works create an evocative dialogue with the city, as Lukov noted when speaking of Lucia Hierro’s installation. Drawing from the vernacular aesthetics of bodegas in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, her oversized soft sculptures interact dynamically with the city landscape.

The dinner itself was part of a new work conceived by artist Tavares Strachan for the show. Black Caesar, Lukov explained, “is about Septimius Severus, who was a Roman Emperor but an African man. Tavares was interested in creating a monument to this lesser-known Roman emperor, who was African and born in what is present-day Libya. It is part of his ongoing project of an ‘Encyclopedia of Visibility,’ focusing on figures hidden or invisibilized in our history books.” The result is a ceramic sculpture that rises from a field of rice—a staple of the Afro-Caribbean diet—serving as a totemic presence that combines various spiritual and formal elements to give form to an overlooked history and individual with few monuments. The pop-up restaurant drew inspiration from this artwork. “The menu mixes North African and Roman Italian cuisine in a very interpretative way,” the curator added. “Hybrid culinary experiences can reflect our hybrid cultures, as it should be today’s culture around the world.”

This ambitious project was not the first for Lukov with WSA; last November, they opened an ice skating rink in Brooklyn designed by Christopher Myers. There was also the exhibition she curated while the building was still under construction and in its raw state, but with this latest show, the potential of the space is clear. Lukov anticipates activating different institutional collaborations and Water Street Projects will soon have an entire floor dedicated to studio residencies for artists coming from abroad who need to produce works for upcoming shows. FEAST, the inaugural festival, will be followed by a tea festival later in 2025, conceived by founding member Karen Wong.