Book Projects

This single-authored monograph (under contract, University of Texas Press) traces the shifting relationships between art and food 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. The book focuses on three case studies of artistic production and alimentary consumption—Tina Modotti and pulque, Carlos E. González and mole poblano, and Rufino Tamayo and watermelon—that highlight the various ways in which artistic renderings of food were used to frame indigenous culture as both the foundation of and a threat to the modern state. Each case study engages the convergence of racial imaginaries, artistic production, and foodways to show how conflictive attitudes toward indigenous heritage and bodies were made manifest through images of and about food and foodways. Therefore, this book examines how seemingly innocuous images of foodstuffs and consumption became implicated in a broader visual, experiential, and commercial battle over the definition of nationalist attitudes toward class, gender, and indigeneity.

To date, this book has been supported by funding from The College of Fine Arts and The Graduate School of Florida State University and the American Antiquarian Society. In addition, this book is supported by a 2019/2020 Tyson Scholars Fellowship at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; a 2019/2020 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment; a 2020/2021 Alumni College Humanities Center Fellowship and a 2022 Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Center, Texas Tech University; and the 2021 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art, since 1750, from the Southeastern College Art Conference.