The Art of Hosting Is The Highest Form of Art, 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 skill of hosting a beautiful dinner party is seen as feminine and is thus devalued under patriarchy. In the tradition of relational aesthetics and social practice art, like that of Tom Marioni and Rirkrit Tiravanija, my gatherings-as-art reclaim the domestic and the relational as legitimate artistic performance. Being raised in poverty by a struggling single mother taught me early on the importance of chosen family, community, and mutual aid; it also revealed the flaws of the nuclear family structure. I regularly host intimate gatherings that celebrate platonic love and cultivate these bonds. I think of these events as social practice, ritual, and prefigurative politics.

 

These happenings transform the labor of care,  often dismissed as “women’s work," into a site of radical hospitality and resistance to isolation culture. Each gathering becomes a living artwork: an ephemeral collective experience built through conversation, intimacy, and sensory experience. In reframing these social rituals as feminist art, I question the exclusionary nature of the Western art canon, and insist that the labor of love, care, and communion are as critical to culture as any object on a pedestal or white wall.

 

Many of these gatherings are conceptually themed and coincide with culturally or seasonally significant times of the year. 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.