November 2013

Canal House

Art of Food — Produced by Monica Rogozinski

This month, Art of Food explores the culinary journey of the The Canal House in Lambertville, New Jersey. Christopher Hirsheimer, the co-founder of Saveur magazine, met food stylist Melissa Hamilton, while working in NewYork. Hirsheimer and Hamilton decided to collaborate their passions for food, emphasizing home cooking for the home cook. Leaving the fast pace nature of New York City behind, they opened their own food styling studio. Part of the collaboration involved breaking for lunch everyday to enjoy a freshly made meal. Images of their daily cooking would be uploaded to their blog which sparked an interest with subscribers for the recipes. One year later, the duo wrote, designed, photographed and illustrated the cookbook “Canal House Cooks Every Day” earning them the 2013 James Beard Award for best cookbook.

Art of Food joins Hirsheimer and Hamilton at their book launching picnic party for their new cookbook Pronto!. The event was held in a barn in Bucks County on the last day of summer. The menu consisted of recipes that can be found throughout the cookbook. Pronto! marks the 9th of a small seasonal cookbook series from The Canal House. The recipes in the books reflect the importance of fresh local seasonal ingredients, as the starting point of creating a great home cooked meal.

Re-Tulled

Art of Life — Produced by Karen Smyles

Traditionally the first fashion show of the new school year, design students at Moore College of Art and Design have to devise, design and showcase a garment based on the theme in just one month’s time. The project is called Jump/Start.

As a tribute to the Pennsylvania Ballet’s 50th Anniversary, Moore fashion design junior and senior students were tasked with using tulle in a contemporary design with a reference to its use in ballet. Tulle has been used for ballet costumes over the years as it has the ability to flow with the music and movement of the dancer’s bodies.

The Pennsylvania Ballet had originally wanted the students to design traditional tutus, however Moore decided to go in a more conceptual and creative direction. In the end, we saw pieces that were far from what most of us will ever see at the ballet.

Art of Life had the opportunity to go behind the scenes in the design studios and see the creative process right from the beginning. Then we returned to see all of the designs work their way down the runway in front of a packed audience, and they were fantastic!

Data and Aesthetics: Sensing Change

Art — Produced by Michael O’Reilly

The Chemical Heritage Foundation is a curiously-named place that highlights not only the history of chemistry but also the intersection of art and science. It has a permanent gallery on Chestnut Street in Old City Philadelphia that exhibits a rotating collection of some of the world’s greatest scientific ephemera. And in a smaller gallery meant to house temporary exhibitions, the exhibits span a vast subject range, as represented by the current SENSING CHANGE exhibit.

Within this exhibit, many of the artists wrestle with how to represent the information of climate change, or what is more colloquially referred to as “global warming”. One of the artists, Diane Burko, pithily sums up the majority attitude of the artists by declaring that she is trying to “straddle issues of data with issues of aesthetics”. There is so much data out there about the “chemical signature of a region”, collected by increasing and increasingly accurate monitoring stations, that to try to represent it with anything other than the eye of the artist seems to destin it to the mis-understood pile of information about climate change. In this ART segment, we talk to a number of artists featured in the SENSING CHANGE exhibit, and each of them tells us about the importance of exciting the viewer, through their art, to deeply consider the world around us and how it is changing.