Over the past several months the Akron Art Museum has been posting a series called Cooking with the Collection. In it, museum staff members look at objects in the museum’s collections and the artists’ back stories as the basis for dishes to cook at home — helpfully providing recipes. Look for these items to be posted on Fridays.
Among the segments archives are those devoted to Claes Oldenburg, Pablo Picasso, William Merritt Chase, Patrick Nagatani, and Robert Motherwell. Some of them are a bit of a stretch. Robert Motherwell’s chocolate mousse is justified by saying that it’s “an abstract recipe that is not only driven by an unquenchable need for chocolate, but is also an expressionistic gesture drawing in food.” On the other hand, weenie royale a la Patrick Nagatani is a recipe that may have been created by Japanese in internment camps in California during World War II — topic that runs through Nagatani’s work since both his parents were interned in the camps.
