Culinary Palettes

"Culinary Palettes examines the visual culture of food in the work of artists in post-revolutionary Mexico, from roughly 1920 to the early 1960s. More broadly, this book stands as a unique intervention into the burgeoning intersections of food history and visual studies. Through a novel approach to the intersection of art and food this book demonstrates how and why the visuality of foodways played a vital role in the negotiation of race, class, and gender in Mexico during a period of rampant modernization, in which the rise of modern cookery through electrical appliances and industrial foodstuffs converged and clashed with the nation's growing nostalgia for its Pre-Columbian heritage. To engage with these issues, this book places the form, value, and labor of foodways into dialogue with some of modern Mexican art's most recognizable figures, such as Rufino Tamayo, Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, and Olga Costa, as well as lesser-known artists within these circles, such as Carlos González and Ernesto García Cabral. Each chapter focuses on a specific artist or artwork combined with a foodstuff, such as Modotti's photograph, Baby Nursing, and pulque, a thick fermented Pre-Columbian beverage which is still widely consumed in modern times, and reveals how these artists were innately entangled with the foodways, kitchens, and cafes that populated not only their everyday lives, but also their artwork. The final chapter brings the work forward into the modern day, by examining the work of famed chef Enrique Olvera and his most famous dish, the madre mole, a dish that draws on Spanish colonial traditions and avant-garde sensibilities and is rooted in traditional botanical illustrations and a modern chef-driven media landscape"--