CAKE SHOW

Curated by Thea Smolinski

December 11 - January 22, 2022

The Pit Palm Springs

This show started, for me, in the winter of 2017: all of my women’s groups – political and parental – were baking for “women’s” causes and candidates. On a January day in LA, we raised almost $30,000 for Planned Parenthood with tables full of homemade cookies. The plans were tinged with a kind of retro irony, but more than one of the leaders of that sale were doing full-time paid work as activists within the next three years. All of this was new to me, but hardly revolutionary. Political and cultural movements have always been helmed by women, and poor women’s neighborhood networks were -and often still are - the original social safety net. They organized childcare, food, loans, medical care with generational lore and pooled resources. Uptown, the middle-class women had charity drives and social leagues across the political spectrum. The most successful of these initiatives were adopted and legislated into government, where women were, obviously, immediately excluded from any positions of leadership. The major social justice movements of the 20th and 21st centuries are notable for the ways in which women were strategically used in and excluded from public-facing positions, even as they were a driving force at every local level.

What I wanted to talk about, then, in addition to cake, was the ways in which women have performed this labor and participated in these networks with and for each other. Throughout the last few weeks, and the mild chaos of first grade and family visits and holidays and art fairs, I’ve thought often of Nora Riggs’s dour office matriarch – presiding grimly over a cake she probably bought on her lunch hour. For me, it’s emblematic of the kind of labor that isn’t less organized for being unofficial. I wondered who she’ll pass the list of birthdays to when she retires – almost certainly not the bald male head opposite. Perhaps to Victoria Nunley’s young exec, kneeling in her power suit, serving perfect slices in the rain, determinedly having it all.

But if this show is about work, it’s also about community and joy. Lilian Martinez celebrates the leisure of Black and Brown women, also implicitly reminding us of the way we police our bodies – the bliss of a vacation includes a break from regulating diet. Dana Sherwood also explores this idea of shame and consumption – her women hide in the belly of beasts to relish the cakes that finally satiate them. The counterpoints to this shame are Polly Borland and Iiu Susiraja’s self-portraits, where softness is a generative luxury and the treadmill an absurd party trick. Similarly, Sarah Slappey makes the violence of (re)production and digestion a rallying cry, and Shantel Miller’s and Judith Linhares’s women nourish and sustain their communities. Wendy Park’s and Katja Farin’s Cassattian apples and pomegranates transmit knowledge across generations, so that Kate Pincus-Whitney can feast on dover sole and Virgina Woolf.

This is a cake show, but it’s also a show about gender and labor and networks.

For more information please email info@the-pit.la