FEAST is a recurring public dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund new and emerging art makers.
What is FEAST and how did you begin?
Jeff Hnilicka: FEAST has been going on for a little over a year and runs out of a church basement in Greenpoint. There are around twenty people who help facilitate it. We come from the art world, food world, and design world, and we are connected to ideas of collectivism and immediacy – things like zines, living room dance parties, bike rides, and dinners. Many of us are also involved with Hit Factorie, an artist collective.
FEAST grew out of our desire to investigate the collapse of cultural production in the face of emerging sustainable food production systems that were successful. We wanted to ask “what is localism?” in relation to cultural production and how the structures of a farm co-op translate to an art economy. In the food world, the sustainable is the heirloom – that is the desired experience. In cultural production, the sustainable is relegated to the amateur, the “craft.” But we wondered: can you produce high quality cultural products using a sustainable model? Those were our basic goals. What developed was a dinner party, where around 300 people come to a church basement every couple of months. We ask for $10-20 donations at the door to attend the dinner, although no one is turned away. Artists propose projects over the course of the meal, and the guests select one project to fund. We vote democratically. Whichever artists get the most votes get a big bag of money with a dollar sign on it. We ask them to come back to the next dinner and present how they used the money.
I should mention that the model for FEAST is not our idea. InCUBATE in Chicago has been doing something called Sunday Soup for a long time. Other similar meals exist through Stock in Portland, Stew in Baltimore, Sugar City in Buffalo, Feast in Columbus, and I recently facilitated a FEAST in Minneapolis during a residency there.