While curating From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art, my co-curators and I spoke extensively about our collective lived experiences with and relationships around food but also about the traditions, spaces, and habits that shaped them. Do you routinely sit with your family to eat every meal? What other activities does the kitchen table accommodate? I lived in a small New York apartment with my family, so the kitchen table for me was where we prepared meals and did homework; where my mom sewed our clothes; where I worked from home during the pandemic. What stories do the kitchen or dining room tables hold for you?
The site of the table can represent intimacy, kinship, and relationality as well as complexity, turmoil, and uncertainty. We can see all of this in the evocative photograph 9PM Dinner by Steven Molina Contreras, which gestures toward the collective experience of an immigrant household—Contreras’s own family—living under separation. This image directs our gaze to the woman sitting at the center of the table. Her forehead is scrunched up and her head rests on her arm as her worried gaze directs us to the next subject in the photograph, a little girl who is sitting apart from the viewer and whose face we cannot see. In the background, behind the woman, we can make out the image of a young man through a mirror.
In 2018, Steven Contreras’s stepfather, Lenin, was required to return to Peru while undergoing a long and complicated process to obtain Permanent Residence status in the United States. Uncertain of when or if he would be allowed to return, Contreras’s family faced a period of turbulence and separation. During Lenin’s absence, Contreras collaborated with his mother, Alma, and his sister, Abigail, to capture this intimate and vulnerable moment in their lives. With this artwork, Contreras and his family invite us to enter into a dialogue around the site of their table.
In 9PM Dinner, United States Contreras intentionally leaves many questions unanswered—the possibility of others seated at the table, the scattered takeaway containers, and the late dinner time (referenced in the title) all speak to a larger sense of ambiguity that is part of this family’s experience. We, the audience, are outside participants observing this dinner taking place, but we also see through the eyes of Contreras as he witnesses his mother’s exhausted face.
A Salvadoran immigrant now based in New York, Contreras was inspired by the Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems. Anchored by a kitchen table and a hanging lamp, each photograph in the Kitchen Table Series is a constructed scene in which Weems plays the lead while accompanied by different characters in a narrative performance with her physical presence that conveys different aspects of womanhood and relationships. Included in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art is one of the photographs in this series, Untitled (Make-up with Daughter), where Weems and her daughter go through the ritual of applying makeup while looking at themselves in the mirror. It’s a captivating image of a shared moment between mother and daughter gesturing at themes of Black motherhood, beauty rituals, and the poignant space of the kitchen table.
In selecting the checklist for From the Field, my co-curators and I initially wanted to pair these two artworks in conversation. After all, both explore the intimacy of collective experiences around the table and family relationships. However, Weems’s photograph has already been exhibited multiple times at the museum and is often pulled for teaching classes in the Bernstein Center for Object Study, along the way receiving considerable light exposure. Light damage to works on paper, including photography, is irreparable, thus the museum enforces protocols on how often a work can be on display. In an effort to be responsible stewards of the collection and safeguard the photograph for future usage, my co-curators and I opted to not include Weems’s photograph in our exhibition, but its resonance with Contreras’s work remains, especially concerning intergenerational artistic practices that center the site of the table.
Contreras and Weems have created images that spark conversation about this intimate space as a site of not only nourishment but also communion, kinship, vulnerability, play and friendship, tension, ritual practice, and a range of other emotions and life experiences. Through the performance narratives intentionally constructed by these artists, we encounter this complex site and reflect on our own experiences there and on the circumstances—regional, political, social, cultural, etc.—that shapes them. As a Salvadoran immigrant myself who has lived periods of separation due to migration, I see 9PM Dinner, United States as a profound act of reclamation. I’m reminded of my own fragmented family dinners and understand, to an extent, this photograph’s moment. Contreras and his family invite us to enter this period of uncertainty with them, yet, in the questions he leaves unanswered, they decide what parts of their narrative we can actually access.
This post was authored by: Beatriz Yanes Martinez, Hood Museum Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Beatriz Yanes Martinez is the 2021–24 Hood Museum of Art Mutual Learning Fellow in the Curatorial and Exhibitions Department. Beatriz graduated from Carleton College with a BA in Latin American studies and as a former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, they have explored the modes of resilience of Central American immigrants, the power of storytelling, the histories of migration and settlement of Central American immigrants in the East Coast. They have collaborated with the CUNY Research Foundation Testimonio’s project, helping collect stories of immigrants impacted by state-led family separation. Her research and creative practice incorporate interdisciplinary elements combining poetry, photography, and storytelling around themes of diasporic resilience and art, queer studies, undocumented resilience, geographies, space and place, and revolutionary art. Beatriz interned at the National Museum of American History where she researched the ways in which undocumented immigrant artists utilize social media tools to foster collaboration and create digital safe spaces. Prior to joining the Hood Museum of Art, Beatriz worked as a Community Fellow at Immigrant Justice Corps.
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