X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly + Eugenia Butler’s The Kitchen Table
A series of four essays from 2011-2012 in X-TRA with condensed transcripts from four of the eight Kitchen Table talks.
Kitchen Table Talk 7:
Our Relationship to Our Environment
Spring 2011, Vol. 13 Number 3
Kitchen Table Talk 3:
Definition of the Self
Summer 2011, Volume 13 Number 4
Kitchen Table Talk 4:
Art & the Power to Change Community
Fall 2011, Volume 14 Number 1
The Kitchen Table, Talk 2:
Art and the Dream
Winter 2011, Vol. 14 Number 2
I first transcribed Eugenia Butler’s Kitchen Table project in 2000 in preparation for her 2003 retrospective. Taking place in a hidden booth at Art/LA ‘93 over four days, the project consisted of conversations over eight meals among a group of 27 artists. The transcription of those conversations was formative in my education as an artist and created a wider envelope for what I understood art to be. When Eugenia passed away in 2008, I didn’t realize that I kept a copy of the transcriptions for my own records. One day on cleaning out my garage, I found a CD with the archives, and began rereading the material with a new appreciation for the work. I was fortunate to partner with X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly to publish condensed transcripts from four of the eight conversations in the project. They can be accessed at the links above.
Upon completion of the four-part series with X-TRA, they engaged art historian Marie B. Shurkus to write an essay about the project, which is titled, Witnessing Eugenia Butler’s Kitchen Table.
The full, unabridged version of all eight conversations, published in 2018, is further detailed HERE.