This tasting menu is a proposal for future dinner parties for anyone interested in the intersection of art, food, and the politics of representation. I focus on 18th and 19th-century Caribbean paintings by Agostino Brunias and Marius-Pierre Le Masurier. These two painters contributed to the natural history discourse and social and racial classification visualization. The dishes I created are meant to be my artistic interpretation of my analysis of the paintings. In addition to the dishes, I will also create my artwork to reflect my analysis.

Initially, my idea was to use art to evaluate how people of color viewed each other. However, I could not locate any painters of color in the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore I am evaluating how a European, or a person of European descent, interrupts how people of color interact with each other. There will always be something lost in the initial painting as the Europen will not capture or understand specific details that are interchanged between the individuals, but also the painter is injecting their thoughts and opinions into the piece. Is the painter creating an idyllic landscape compared to the cartoonish representation of people with dark skin, while those with lighter skin may have more European features?

What caused me to be interested in this topic of the inter-racism between people of color and whether or not it is depicted in artwork was the fact that I didn’t realize I had experienced racism until it was from another woman or a group of women of color. This boggles my mind why people of color are willing to put one another down even though, as a collective group, we all want the same thing, to be treated equally, with respect, and without prejudice. Did they realize that they were being racist or have passive-aggressive ways of differentiation just been ingrained in our culture and psyche?

I started to examine paintings by the 18th Century Caribbean painters Agostino Brunias and Marius-Pierre Le Masurier. I enjoyed evaluating their work and wanted to take it one step further, and a creative way to do so was to create a tasting menu inspired by the interactions between people of color within the paintings and the food depicted. Creating a tasting menu based on these paintings was tedious, and I didn’t know where to start. Therefore, I began by creating my artwork that would reflect the paintings I selected to help inspire the menu.

My painting comprises paper, paint, glue, and a canvas. The first step was to paint on canvas. I chose metallic copper paint that I mixed with cranberry red. Then I took large sheets of paper and painted one side black while the other side was painted using a mixture of black paint and Phthalo Green. I chose these colors as Agostino Brunias and Marius-Pierre Le Masurier have a muted color palette but then have elements that pop with copper red, bright blues, and yellows. After the sheets of paper had been painted and the paint dried, I cut them into strips of all different lengths. Then came the arduous yet meditative task of rolling the strips of paper into a cone shape. Some days I spent 7 hours just rolling or "quilling" the paper. When I reached the end of a strip of paper, I would cut the edge into a semi-circle and then glue the edge down to the cone.

Repeat this process many times over. While rolling the paper, my mind would wonder what dish I could create using this process, how the artists might have felt during the painting process, or how they felt depicting a group of marginalized people. Did these painters select this population because they wanted to elevate how the world viewed them? Was it solely for documentation purposes? Who commissioned the paintings and why? Why is painting a group of people who are a mixture of European and African descent important? What is their role in society? What jobs or professions did they have? What does the environment in which they are depicted say about the group of people? How does the painting style of these artists enhance or take away from the value of those being depicted? What is Caribbean Impressionism? What did those depicted eat? 

So many questions kept coming to mind while creating my work inspired by these artists. 

The best place to start was to define what Caribbean Impressionism is. Curators at the Brooklyn Museum in New York define it as an exchange between Europe and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century that was inspired by Paul Cézanne, Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, (https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/touring/francisco_oller). As someone who studied Studio Art and Art History during my undergraduate studies, I was amazed to learn that Impressionism had made its way to the Caribbean. Why, for the most part, are all of our studies European centered? Why are Europeans the ones to write or depict the history of a place? Did these painters inflict their European views on those they painted? How are people of color, regarding the class, represented compared to those who are white? Did their skin color dictate what foods they could purchase at the market?

The artwork that I am creating ties into this through the interpretation of creating something that is elevated out of materials that are used every day. It straddles the line of is it art just as the idea that a person who was categorized as mulatto was higher in class than an enslaved person but was still looked down upon by someone who was white. The color story also ties my work to the artists that I have decided to focus on. The shapes that are formed by the grouping of paper are also in an impressionist style, in my opinion.

While creating the recipes for the dishes, it was frustrating as I started with sugar. My base was a family tart recipe that consisted of a basic dough recipe using Crisco and either guava paste or stew coconut. The recipe was my great-grandmother's, and everything is measured in handfuls. I small handful of sugar, a heaping handful of flour, and add flavorings such as vanilla or almond extract to taste. This is difficult for me to interpret as we all have different size hands. I never met my great-grandmother, so I did not get to see her method of making it, and my grandmother only makes it on special occasions such as Christmas. My grandmother, the youngest of seven, is the only one of her siblings who know how to make it; therefore, there has never been an exchange of ideas on how to improve the tart between family members. Who can make it the best? Maybe the recipe my grandmother provided me has already been altered as she may have found ingredients in New York that are not available on Anegada, a small island in the British Virgin Islands. While sourcing the ingredients for the dish, I was brought back to a reading from High on the Hog as well as an episode of Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, who speaks with Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, about how enslaved people created dishes and remembered recipes. -There were no written recipes, and they had to use their past knowledge, senses, and memories to create dishes. Such as the pound of grain and the rhythm it created to know when it was done or how much longer it needed to grounded for.