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Petit Takett: Love, Legacy, and Recipes from the Maghreb
"I find it fascinating how a recipe box can spark a new art project," says Curator Doris Berger,
referencing LA artist Orly Olivier, who inherited a small wooden box containing handwritten cards
from her late father, an enthusiastic cook and entertainer of Tunisian Jewish descent. This led Olivier to
start the Petit Takett project, which involved a blog and a dinner series honoring her family's heritage.
"One way we brought this idea of
connecting family history through food to
the exhibition space at the Skirball, and
made it more universal, is with a recipe
mosaic," says Berger of a wall painting
offered to visitors of different religions
and ethnicities to fill with recipe notes.
"I find it exciting to see a family history
that became an artwork transform into a
participatory work with a collective history."
Through Jan. 10, 2016
Manzanar: e Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams
This little explored interlude in Adams' career probes a troubling time in the nation's history.
In shifting his focus from magnificent landscapes to Japanese Americans forcibly interned at
Manzanar, Adams produced an important historical record—a study of injustice happening some
200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The photos went on to appear in Adams' book Born Free and
Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans. Published in 1944, while the country was still at war,
the volume stirred controversy, introducing Adams as an activist.
"As the managing curator on this exhibition, I have been able to work with a diverse range
of material, including photographs featuring different perspectives on Japanese American
incarceration by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake, as well as original artifacts
and artwork from the Manzanar camp," says Linde B. Lehtinen, assistant curator at Skirball. Letters
and documents put a personal face on an experience that not only included incarceration, but
also "acts of resistance and protest." Essential is the exhibition space, its palette meant to evoke
Manzanar's desert surrounds for an immersive look at a complex history. Oct. 8-Feb. 21, 2016
FROM LEFT TAKETT'S, A RESTAURANT IN TUNISIA, 1950 FAMILY PHOTO TAKEN IN TAKETT'S, 1953
ROSH HASHANAH IN ISRAEL, 2005. PHOTOS COURTESY OF PETIT TAKETT.
FROM LEFT ENTRANCE TO MANZANAR, 1943, PHOTO BY ANSEL ADAMS
YOUNG EVACUEES OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY WAIT THEIR TURN FOR BAGGAGE
INSPECTION, TURLOCK, CA, 1942, PHOTO BY DOROTHEA LANGE
