I am strongly considering hopping on a bus on Saturday to Washington, DC and heading to the Smithsonian to see Zilly Rosen's 5,600 cupcake art installation piece honoring Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. Is anyone else in or near DC going? Danielle? I'd love to meet up; I probably wouldn't get there til 2 or 3, but definitely in time to eat a piece of cupcake history! I still remember stumbling across the original images on election night and knowing this was going to be big, very very big.
Here's a little more on the exhibit from WKBW:
Zilly Rosen says her work is one part art, one part performance, one part celebration, and one part dessert.
The Buffalo baker has been selected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, to create an image out of cupcakes for Family Fun Day on Saturday, during Presidents' Day weekend. The artwork will span 11 feet by 16 feet, and it will be made of almost 6,000 cupcakes. The design includes the faces of Mr. Obama and Abraham Lincoln with an American Flag behind them. Rosen says she's using 17 colors and variations to create the image.
Upon completion of the display, the museum's visitors will eat the cupcakes. For more information, go to Rosen's Web site. www.zillycakes.com
Some non-Obama cupcakes from Zilly Rosen's blog
And Zilly Rosen, like everyone else in the world, now has a blog!
Here's what she writes about her original Obama cupcake piece and the attention it got:
The fact that my crazy Obama cupcake project garnered national attention was wonderful! It felt like a lark, a delight, a crazy woman's epic love poem in food to someone who moves her and inspires her. Through the interest in the project that followed, I began to be more aware of the way the medium itself spoke as much as the image. Cupcakes. In the hierarchy of art materials, where fiber is low and metal and glass are high, where oil is better than acrylic, and where representational work battles it out with conceptual work, where do cupcakes fall? A medium that can be bought at any grocery store and mastered by anyone with an oven and a wooden spoon. A medium that is intrinsically American, and chock-full of emotional connotations. A medium that requires audience participation, that pulls you in and then leaves the gallery as a part of you. A medium that is ephemeral in nature, existing briefly as an installation, but enduring in the memory of those who partook of it.
Is it an image? An installation? A performance? To me, it's a process, and the conception of it came about as much from my love of domestic arts and decorative arts as it did from studying gallery artists. I have always been moved by the beautiful work women have done and still do to make their chores joyful and their daily grind more beautiful. Stitching and baking and making objects for use are acts I hold in high esteem. So this new art of mine comes as much from that reverence as from seeds planted by artists who inspired my in art school. The grid on which I base my installations belongs to the weaver and the beader and the needlepointer as much as to Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett , and Sol Lewitt (all of whom have been influential in my work, too).
See also: our cupcake interview with Zilly Rosen
Here's a little more on the exhibit from WKBW:
Zilly Rosen says her work is one part art, one part performance, one part celebration, and one part dessert.
The Buffalo baker has been selected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, to create an image out of cupcakes for Family Fun Day on Saturday, during Presidents' Day weekend. The artwork will span 11 feet by 16 feet, and it will be made of almost 6,000 cupcakes. The design includes the faces of Mr. Obama and Abraham Lincoln with an American Flag behind them. Rosen says she's using 17 colors and variations to create the image.
Upon completion of the display, the museum's visitors will eat the cupcakes. For more information, go to Rosen's Web site. www.zillycakes.com
Some non-Obama cupcakes from Zilly Rosen's blog
And Zilly Rosen, like everyone else in the world, now has a blog!
Here's what she writes about her original Obama cupcake piece and the attention it got:
The fact that my crazy Obama cupcake project garnered national attention was wonderful! It felt like a lark, a delight, a crazy woman's epic love poem in food to someone who moves her and inspires her. Through the interest in the project that followed, I began to be more aware of the way the medium itself spoke as much as the image. Cupcakes. In the hierarchy of art materials, where fiber is low and metal and glass are high, where oil is better than acrylic, and where representational work battles it out with conceptual work, where do cupcakes fall? A medium that can be bought at any grocery store and mastered by anyone with an oven and a wooden spoon. A medium that is intrinsically American, and chock-full of emotional connotations. A medium that requires audience participation, that pulls you in and then leaves the gallery as a part of you. A medium that is ephemeral in nature, existing briefly as an installation, but enduring in the memory of those who partook of it.
Is it an image? An installation? A performance? To me, it's a process, and the conception of it came about as much from my love of domestic arts and decorative arts as it did from studying gallery artists. I have always been moved by the beautiful work women have done and still do to make their chores joyful and their daily grind more beautiful. Stitching and baking and making objects for use are acts I hold in high esteem. So this new art of mine comes as much from that reverence as from seeds planted by artists who inspired my in art school. The grid on which I base my installations belongs to the weaver and the beader and the needlepointer as much as to Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett , and Sol Lewitt (all of whom have been influential in my work, too).
See also: our cupcake interview with Zilly Rosen
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Zilly
Liz
AHHHhhhh I am sooooooo mad I will not be in town this weekend!! You should definitely come into town for this though - I'll get myself to NYC one of these days! I'm sure a lot of the meetup members will be checking this out. If you do come, you'll have to check out a few of DC's cupcakeries - Red Velvet, Hello Cupcake, Georgetown Cupcake - I know they'd love to have you!
So sorry I won't be here!