Art, anthropology, and oral history converge in Food, Flesh, and Care—a virtual Vital Fuel exhibition on Art Placer that reveals women’s relationships with food; debuting October 2025.
Online Art Exhibition — Nutrition & Women
What Is The Exhibition About?
A curated virtual exhibition where artists, anthropologists, and historians investigate how food, nutrition, gender, and health intersect in women’s lives. Through photography, mixed media, video, and archival research, the show surfaces intimate — and sometimes hidden — relationships between women and food: the nourishing, the forbidden, and the ceremonial.
Why it matters?
Art creates an empathetic space to reveal women’s nutritional experiences, social norms, and unequal access to healthy diets. By pairing visual practice with anthropology and oral history, the exhibition reframes nutrition as a cultural practice tied to care, power, identity, and bodily autonomy, inviting audiences to see everyday food work as political and generative.
What we’re including:
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Media: photography, mixed media, video works, archival documents, and oral-history word collections.
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Thematic galleries that structure the virtual visit.
Topics We Cover
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Maternal nutrition and postpartum food practices.
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Women & fungi: foraging, knowledge transmission, and market roles.
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Staples and coarse grains: root crops, millet, cassava processing.
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Food preservation: fermentation, drying, and household storage techniques.
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Food labor and the “kitchen revolution”: tea rooms, domestic tech, and public dining access.
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Body image, dieting, and social norms around women’s eating.
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The “forbidden”: taboos, rituals, and hidden economies tied to women’s diets.
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Female chefs, culinary innovators, and community food entrepreneurship.
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Processed foods and changing snack cultures in urban contexts.
Vital Fuel
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