Public Kitchen Images...

Our "Hub" at Upham's Corner Main Street

DS4SI's Public Kitchen connected hundreds of residents in Upham's Corner and down Dudley Street. We hosted a week of the "pop-up food community center" at Upham's Corner Main Street (many thanks to Max and all our guests!) We also enjoyed multiple meals, events and artists at the amazing Dudley Greenhouse and the lovely Shirley Eustis House. Here are some peeks into the action...

Lead chef Nadine Nelson cooked up some amazing spreads!

Toni Tipton-Martin's amazing images from her Jemima Code Art Exhibit

A young participant uses our Mobile Ideation Kit

The "extreme radical chef" competition in action at Friday's Unconference

City Growers and Dudley Greenhouse and Red Fire Farm offered us amazing fresh local vegetables

Feast Mass raised and donated $1500 for a miini grant on Saturday

We'll keep you posted as we move forward on digesting all we learned during our 10 days of Public Kitchen! If you were a part of it and would like to share ideas for how to move it forward or re-imagine it, feel free to email us at publickitchen [at] ds4si.org

Public Kitchen was an intervention aimed at social and food justice-- an experiment in how more vibrant public infrastructures can improve the quality of our lives. Our art and design team included Chef Nadine Nelson of Global Local Gourmet and the Golden Arrows design collective.  Many thanks to our community partners : Upham's Corner Main Street, The Food Project, Shirley Eustis House, Haley House, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative  and City Growers.

Boston Foundation Cultural Arts Mini-Grant Info Session @ PK Tuesday

Just a reminder to local artists that Boston Foundation is coming to the Public Kitchen Hub tomorrow to answer questions about their upcoming ExpressingBoston mini-grant. Come find out how easy it is to apply!

Click here to download the mini-grant as a PDF.

Click here for more information on the grant and info session.

Our Public Kitchen Hub is open all week from 4-8pm at Upham's Corner Main Street (545 Columbia Road, next to The Strand).

 

Crisco Inferno! Black Ramen? The Radical Chefs Square Off...

The teams are getting set, preparing mystery ingredients and sharpening their knives...

Come Friday night to the activist chef competition and see 4 teams battle it out for the 1st ever title of EXTREME [RADICAL] CHEF!

Our 4 fierce teams are: Crisco Inferno, Black Ramen, Haley House and The Food Project.

See you at the Greenhouse!

Fall Food Tailgate Postponed to Sunday

Public Kitchen's Fall Food Tailgate has been postponed until Sunday due to expected inclement weather on Friday evening.

We are now combining our Fall Food Tailgate Party with our NOURISH event already happening that day, so look forward to a great afternoon of music, fresh cider press, pumpkin decorating, Sage Gourmets, healthy food tasting, and much more...  And Sunday should be beautiful!

Mini-Grant Opportunities @ Public Kitchen

DS4Si is excited to announce two mini-grant funding opportunities during our Public Kitchen. First, we will be hosting an information session for the new Expressing Boston mini-grant from Boston Foundation on Tuesday, October 23rd, from 5:30-6:30 at the Public Kitchen Hub (at Upham's Corner Main Street Office, 545 Columbia Road, Dorchester).

ExpressingBoston is a new Boston Foundation initiative that will celebrate the diverse cultural identities of Boston's over 140 ethnic communities through cultural flash mobs in all of the city's neighborhoods.  This initiative is a small grants opportunity for individuals, groups, and organizations that seeks to challenge and destabilize normalized notions of what qualifies as art, who can create art, how art should be made, where art should be exhibited, and how audiences should engage with art, while uplifting the rich history and identities of Boston's ethnic communities. Grants will be awarded in 2013.

Don't consider yourself an artist? Don't have 501(c)(3) status or a fiscal sponsor? That's okay!  ExpressingBoston is open to everyone.  If you'd like to learn more about applying for or participating in ExpressingBoston, please come to this information session! (Download application here.)

 

On Saturday, October 27th, Feast Mass will fund one project completely from the donations made towards that night's meal at the Dudley Greenhouse (15 Brook Ave, Roxbury):

 

 

Saturday – Feast Mass!

Feast Mass, Dudley Greenhouse,  7-10pm, $15 suggested donation

Feast Mass is a recurring dinner party in Boston. During the night, people present proposals for creative, community-engaged projects that need funding. Everyone votes, and the winner receives a grant funded entirely from the night's donations. 100 tickets will be available throughout the 10-day Public Kitchen.  The call for proposals is open now and will continue until the day before Feast. To find out more or submit a proposal, go to feastmass.blogspot.com. We expect the grant to be in the neighborhood of $700–$1,000. 

 

Public Kitchen Update

Our Public Kitchen team is working 'round the clock to make Public Kitchen our biggest social intervention yet. We are working with Uphams Corner Main Streets to secure a pop-up kitchen space that will be a resource and refuge for the neighborhood, a place where anyone can stop by to get a bite, borrow a recipe, or join a cooking or art project.

Our slate of events for the week includes the amazing Jemima Code Art Project (below), an activist cooking competition, a Night Bazaar, farmers' market cooking, and much more... 

Want to learn more, volunteer, compete in our activist Cook Off, sell at our Night Bazaar or apply for a Feast Mass mini-grant?  Find us at…

FB: facebook.com/publickitchen

Twitter: @ds4si

Email:  publickitchen@ds4si.org

Public Kitchen Team Selected

We're super excited to announce our Public Kitchen art commission winners. We have an all-star local team, including Nadine Nelson of Global Local Gourmet along with Nerissa Cooney and Alexander Hage from Golden Arrows. Rounding out the squad is Aziza Robinson, who we're excited to have back at the Studio to coordinate art commissions and Studio events.

Keep an eye out for this crew! (From left: Alex, Aziza, Nerissa, Nadine)

Thanks to all of our commission entrants and finalists!

Public Kitchen Art Commission Extended

The Design Studio has extended their commission for an artist/culinary team interested in designing a week-long open Public Kitchen in September or October.  The new deadline for applications is August 16th.

The commissioned team will get:

  • $4,000 commission, plus $1000 budget
  • A space near Uphams Corner for their installation of the Public Kitchen
  • A built brick stove from Bread Oven
  • Free fruits and vegtables from Fair Foods

Interested? Learn more about the Public Kitchen and the art commission here.

Dance Court II this Saturday!

Dance Court II will be held at the tennis courts across from the Studio this Saturday, August 11th, from 4-8pm. DJ Keith Donaldson will be spinning.

(The courts are next to Jim Rice Field and across from us @ 1946 Washington Street, Roxbury.)

Dance Court is an urban research and development project of the Design Studio for Social Intervention. It asks the question, “If dance courts were part of the ubiquitous landscape like basketball and tennis courts, how would they be used?”

Our first Dance Court experiment included a sound system and DJ that we set up in the local unused tennis court across from the Studio. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, unlike basketball and tennis, the idea of a casual impromptu dance space required tons of paperwork and pre-planning. Permits were required and expected to be applied for literally weeks ahead of time. It is this sort of public space policy that can get in the way not just of dancing, but of a vibrant public life. Multiply this by the fact that poor communities and youth of color are hyper-policed, and you have a tremendous barrier to civic life. It is also an example of what we call spatial injustice.

P.S. If you are interested in bringing Dance Court to a park near you or want more info about this event, contact Kenneth Bailey at kdb [at] ds4si.org.

Public Kitchen Art Commission Posted

Call to Artists / Request for Qualifications

The Design Studio for Social Intervention seeks an artist / culinary team to collaborate with us on the “Public Kitchen,” the first commission in DS4SI’s series “The Public: A Work in Progress.”

As public infrastructures--hospitals, water, schools, transportation, etc--are privatized, the Public Kitchen takes a stab at going in the reverse direction. It is an installation designed to help us realize that the ways in which public infrastructures can improve the quality of our lives is still a work in progress.  We still have room to imagine the futures we want to create! Doing this takes experimentation and creativity.To spark that, the Public Kitchen is a “productive fiction,” and as such it’s our experimentation with a new, more vibrant social infrastructure that:

  • Challenges the public’s own feelings that “public” means poor, broken down, poorly run, and “less than” private
  • Engages communities in claiming public space, the social and food justice
  • Makes a new case for public infrastructures through creating ones that don’t exist

Our goals for the commission are to show how this kind of infrastructure might improve people’s private and public lives, as well as to make a case for public infrastructure in general. The way in which the commission points back to a point of possibility for public infrastructure and in real time is a delightful experience for its participants is part of the design challenge for this commission.

Commission Delivery:

We are looking for an artist / culinary team with the vision and skills to build out and program an “outdoor open kitchen” for a week. Programming could include classes, competitions, recipe sharing, co-cooking culturally shared ingredients, etc. People from surrounding neighborhoods should be able to cook, share recipes, talk food, and eat at Public Kitchen. For more ideas on what the Design Studio has already done around the Public Kitchen, check out the video from our indoor installation during Roxbury Open Studios 2011: /blog/2011/11/8/public-kitchen-the-video.html

The commissioned team will get:

  • $4,000 commission, plus $1000 budget
  • A space near Uphams Corner for their installation of the Public Kitchen
  • A built brick stove from Bread Oven
  • Free fruits and vegtables from Fair Foods

Process / Timeline:

August 3rd

Artist submissions due

August 7th

DS4SI selects and notifies 3-5 finalist teams

August 9th—13th

DS4SI interviews finalists

August 15th

Selection and notification of winning artist

September-October

Installation implementation.  Note: the selected artist will be expected to spend 15 hrs with DS4SI on installation design and testing. The final installation must run for a week and be completed by Oct 31st.  

How to Submit:

Please read full submission requirements here.

 

DS4SI Action Lab @ Roots & Remedies Conference in NOLA

 

We set up our first "pop-up studio" for the Roots & Remedies conference in New Orleans this past weekend. The conference brought together over 200 organizers to think about transformative community organizing and policy work towards creating healthy, just communities.

We invited them into a creative design space and challenged them to think both linearly and nonlinearly about creating effective social interventions and cultural tactics that could support their organizing work.

Here was our Action Lab design tool before...

During...

 

And after...

Other folks got more 3D with it on our less linear tables...

We'll post more photos and videos when we get home. Many thanks to all our visitors, volunteers and to The Praxis Project for inviting us!

 
 
 

The Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) partners with communities, artists, and social justice practitioners to imagine, demonstrate, and collectively rebuild places to be more just and vibrant. Get in touch to inquire about art commissions, residencies or to hire us to run a creativity lab or other generative process for your organization, coalition or campaign.