The Art of Hosting Is The Highest Form of Art, 2017-ongoing

(titled after Tom Moriani's The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, 1970-1979) 

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The art of hosting is seen as feminine and is thus devalued under patriarchy.

In the tradition of relational aesthetics art, like that of Tom Marioni and Rirkrit Tiravanija, my gatherings-as-art reclaim the domestic and the relational as legitimate artistic performance and honor skills dubbed "feminine". Being raised in poverty by a struggling single mother taught me early on the importance of chosen family and community; it also revealed the shortcomings of the nuclear family structure. I regularly host intimate gatherings that celebrate platonic love, cultivate these bonds and respond to our epidemic of loneliness and isolation. As art and life are inseparable, I think of these events as both. 

 

These happenings transform the labor of care and hosting, often dismissed as “women’s work," into a site of radical hospitality and resistance to individualist culture. Each gathering becomes a living artwork: an ephemeral collective experience built through unique energies, conversation, intimacy, and decoration. I pay close attention to aesthetic and sensory detail: foraging bouquets, lighting candles, cooking food you can smell, decorating with intentional color palette etc. In reframing these rituals and social traditions as feminist art, I question the narrowness of the Western art canon. Many of these gatherings are conceptually themed and coincide with culturally or seasonally significant times of the wheel of the year. 

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Manifestations of Luv is an annual event I have hosted every year since 2017. Taking place in the same month as Valentine's Day, it serves as a reaction to a world that centers romantic love, transactional relations, and the couple form. A more radical version of 'galentines day,' we practice vulnerability, loving-kindness, feminist consciousness-raising, and being in sacred circle.