“Imagine arriving at a dinner party with your favorite artists just as it’s ended,” says Divya Saraf, SFMOMA curatorial assistant of architecture and design, “and each object on the table, from teapots to wine glasses, tells a story of ritual and performance that surround the sensual experience of dining.” Table Manners, the Floor 3 exhibition curated by Saraf and Daryl McCurdy, associate curator of architecture and design, takes you there through more than 40 works from the mid-20th century to the present drawn from the museum’s extensive tableware collection.
The exhibition presents works grounded in deeply established cultural practices, but that rethink conventions around consumption through innovation, accessibility, technology, and the absurd. Eating and drinking are among our most intimate daily experiences; beyond utilitarian, our relationship to the objects of the table is visceral, personal, and familial.
“SFMOMA is excited to expand our collection with works by designers who are innovating and questioning the tools we use to eat and the relationship between food and community.”
“SFMOMA is excited to expand our collection with works by designers who are innovating and questioning the tools we use to eat and the relationship between food and community,” says Saraf. For instance, Jinhyun Jeon’s Rear Bump spoons are designed to stimulate different parts of the mouth as you eat, inspired by the phenomenon of synesthesia, where stimulus to one sense can affect other senses. Jeon describes her spoons as “sensory cross wiring” that use color, tactility, temperature, volume, weight, and form to affect how we experience taste.
“Even the same type of food or drink can have different rituals and resonances depending on their social and cultural context,” says Saraf. Mirrors for Aliens, by Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary of the design studio soft-geometry, presents steel thalis, traditional Indian plates, hand-polished to a mirror-like finish. The work captures the designers’ experience of living in the U.S. as “aliens,” the term the government uses to describe non-citizens. The meticulously handcrafted thalis offer softly distorted reflections, a metaphor for the nuanced sense of identity shaped by living between cultures, countries, homes, and workplaces.
Many works delve into accessibility for multiple types of bodies through innovations such as self-stabilizing spoons and textured ergonomic utensils that are easier to hold. Others take desire as their point of departure. During the COVID-19 pandemic, artist Isabel Rower created Intimate Spoon (2020), a circular spoon that can be used by two people at once, poignantly commenting on togetherness in a time of social distancing.
From inclusive engineering to reinvented customs, Table Manners explores how design shapes our relationship to food, and how dining can be a profound communal and cultural experience.