Alumna Lesley Wolff (PhD 2018) has published a new book, Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, with the University of Texas Press as part of the book series Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History, edited by Ernesto Capello and Jessica Stites Mor. The book emerges from Wolff’s dissertation, completed under the direction of Dr. Michael Carrasco. In it, Wolff examines how the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexican heritage.
From the University of Texas Press: “Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in competing claims to a new nationhood.”
Reflecting on the development of the manuscript, Wolff remarks on the significance of her graduate studies with Dr. Carrasco: “I came to FSU at a time in my life when I knew I was passionate about art and about cooking, but I had no intellectual direction or sense of how to cultivate these mutual interests. I’m fortunate to have found a mentor in Michael Carrasco who generously helped me forge a path that stayed true to my passions while opening my eyes to the ways in which I could be at home in the expanded field of visual culture studies.”
Culinary Palettes will be released April 1st. For more: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330814/
