Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

In Beats All I Ever Saw, we have an ordinary kitchen appliance, complete with recipe card, a bowl full of pink cake batter, a plastic spatula, and a muffin tin filled with cupcake batter. The whole ensemble is a big mess, as is cake baking itself. The pink batter reminded me of the ever-spreading pink goop in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Today we might call that a virus. The mixing bowl here is deep blue with golden curlicues. It bears adaptations of Wayne Thiebaud’s 1971 Four Cupcakes and Phillip Guston’s 1978 Painter’s Forms II, in an ironic counterpoint to the preciousness of real Sèvres adored by Louis XVI. Instead of labels and logos, an adaptation of Eggbeater, a 1930 cubist painting by Stuart Davis depicting three ordinary objects on a table, appears on the head of the machine; and Elizabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun’s 1783 portrait of Marie-Antoinette is on the splattered recipe card. This portrait showed the queen underdressed, which created a controversy akin to the stir raised by the retort “let them eat cake”, which history proves she did not utter. Tintoretto’s Feeding the Multitudes peeks out behind the pink dyed batter glopped into the muffin tin. For me, Beats All I Ever Saw questions our good, charitable intentions. Just what are we feeding the multitudes? Jennifer’s take on this was to embrace the messy joy of it. She found a connection in close proximity when learning the Adam’s Extract Company was started directly across the street from the Neill- Cochran house. The story is that the neighborhood kids helped with the bottling. Adams was the first to concoct a vanilla extract that didn’t bake out. They invented the red coloring that solved the beet- extract shortage and made Red Velvet Cake possible, circulating the new recipe far and wide. Jennifer says red velvet is a classic and proposed a contest that will feature this sculpture and samples of the real thing. That event can also share the history of the old game of Cakewalk, which originated in a “prize walk” dance by slaves on plantation grounds to mimic the manners of white people.