Wolfsonian-FIU ‘Modern Meals’ exhibition to open at the Frost Art Museum Oct. 12

Poster, "Corn." The Food of the Nation, 1918. Designed by Lloyd Harrison (dates unknown). Published by the United States Food Administration. Commercial color lithograph. The Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, Fla. Gift of Henry S. Hacker.

Beginning Oct. 12 at the Frost Art Museum at Modesto A. Maidique Campus,  The Wolfsonian-FIU will present “Modern Meals: Remaking American Foods from Farm to Kitchen,” an exhibition that explores how technology and design remade the places where food was produced, sold, cooked and eaten from the turn of the century into the post-1945 period.

The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, will be on view in the museum’s Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery through the fall semester. The Oct. 12 opening will be marked in conjunction with the Frost’s Target Wednesday After Hours program.

More than a century ago, people in the United States began eating foods that, instead of being grown and prepared at home or nearby, were mass-produced and distributed on national and global scales. Images and artifacts from the Wolfsonian-FIU’s collection illustrate the movement of food, from the field to the factory to the supermarket and kitchen table, in order to explore how modern technology, design and business practices created new meanings for food and eating in this era.

For this project, the Wolfsonian collaborated with FIU Department of History professor April Merleaux, who will teach a course that addresses the history of food in the United States.

“There’s been growing interest in local foods and questions of nutrition, health and sustainability over the last decade,” she said. “What people may not realize is that our current system for producing, buying and eating food has roots that stretch back for more than a century. It turns out that the period covered by Wolfsonian collections coincides with one of the most important moments in the development of modern, mass-marketed food.”

The more than three dozen items on display will include posters, print, and advertisements, as well as objects such as toasters, cookware and tableware, all of which invite visitors to consider how commercialization has shaped modern American foodways. These objects reveal how the values of industrial efficiency and design shaped the landscapes and intimate spaces of food production and consumption, but also how – even amidst these changes – American culture continued to idealize generations-old practices in the fields and the home.

“Modern Meals” is the fourth exhibition presented by The Wolfsonian-FIU with the Frost’s collaboration and co-curated by Jonathan Mogul, the Mellon coordinator of Academic Programs at the Wolfsonian. Supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery provides an opportunity for FIU faculty members to work with museum staff in developing exhibitions from the Wolfsonian collection that serve as resources for teaching and learning, and advance scholarly research.