Galleries and museums play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of the artists they represent, often hosting dinners designed to promote artists and connect them with collectors and curators. This treatment, however, is mainly afforded to well-established artists. Arts professional Anna Yi Xie witnessed this phenomenon firsthand while interning at Gagosian in New York City. In 2024, Xie set out to create an alternative to the gallery-hosted dinner, a platform that offers early-career artists the opportunity to show their work and meet influential figures in the art world. After all, the social and professional networks that artists develop can further their careers just as much as showing their work.
The resulting project, Happenings, is a series of carefully curated culinary experiences hosted in exhibition spaces throughout New York City. These dinners pair a featured artist with an aspiring chef. The chef then produces a creative and conceptual extension of the artist’s work, occasionally with input from the artist.
Encouraging artists to establish vital professional connections, Xie strategically invites roughly 20 guests to the dinners. Most of the attendees are young collectors, curators, art scholars, and gallery representatives. This model allows artists to develop social fluency by interacting with those interested in their work, a key part of sustaining their careers. In addition to the networks they build at the dinners, artists receive a stipend when Happenings profits from the events.
Happenings offers a similar opportunity for aspiring chefs. The project’s format affords them complete autonomy for culinary experimentation, beyond the constraints of traditional restaurant hierarchies. As most Happenings events take place at galleries or other arts venues with tiny kitchens, chefs have used their ingenuity to turn out sophisticated five-course dinners despite limitations. Xie stresses the important role chefs play in the events. To her, they are the “costars” of these dinners, showcasing their flair alongside the artists. Happenings has collaborated with chefs whose backgrounds include Michelin-starred restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park, Jean-Georges, Atomix, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Participating artists have gone on to show their work at major galleries and art collectives. The debut dinner in 2024 featured artist Hafsa Nouman, a Yale MFA graduate, and chef Joshua Pringle. Nouman currently has work on view in Palo Gallery’s group show, Subject Object. A later iteration of Happenings paired artist Candela Bado, an alum of Columbia University’s MFA program, with chef Anthony Trabasas to produce a four-course menu inspired by the visual language of the artist’s work. Bado was recently featured by Salón Acme in Mexico City.
As for the future of Happenings, Xie is ambitious. The project has thus far been limited to artists based in New York State. “Our goal is to become more international,” she says, “either bringing on artists or operating in cities beyond New York and the United States.” The project engages with two deeply human pursuits: art and food, which will no doubt resonate across borders and cultures.
About the writer: Alex Dean is a writer based in Brooklyn. She has a BA in art history and studio art from Pomona College and is currently pursuing her MS in Museums and Digital Culture at Pratt Institute. She writes articles and web-based content for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To learn more about her work, visit https://www.alex-dean.com/projects.
Happenings, @happeningsny