“Hey, you got your art in my food.”
“You got your food in my art!”
These two great tastes have been colliding in unexpected places across the Valley this fall. Through its Table for Ten campaign, Museums10—a consortium of local museums—has been finding innovative ways to combine a taste for fine art with a passion for cuisine.
In September, the Emily Dickinson museum re-opened the kitchen, scullery, pantry and dining room of the poet’s home. This month the Eric Carle museum will feature an exhibit of food imagery in children’s books. As rich as many of these offerings have been, though, it’s hard to imagine a more immediate, hands-on, and satisfying melding of these two interests than can be found tromping around Mike’s Maze in Sunderland.
For the past decade, artist and maze designer Will Sillin has worked with friend, neighbor and farmer Mike Wissemann to create a vast corn maze on six acres of land at Warner Farm in Sunderland, just below Mount Sugarloaf. The mazes often depict a celebrity. In past years the paths cut through the corn stalks have portrayed, for example, Julia Child, Einstein, and Babe Ruth, and there is often a treasure hunt within the maze that’s based on that year’s theme.
This year, Sillin broke from tradition as far as subject matter was concerned: from the air (or the top of Sugarloaf) the maze has the shape of a can of Campell’s Tomato Soup framed with the words “Find Art.” Though he’s changed direction with the maze portrait, the activities he’s created this year to entice visitors to explore the entire maze build on previous challenges and surpass them.
Along with a set of art history-related trivia questions sprinkled throughout the maze, Sillin has also constructed a series of wooden printing presses. Visitors carry a sheet of paper with them into the maze, and each press has a stamp with a different ink color on it (cyan, magenta and yellow). When the impressions from each press are combined, a series of four colorful images appear.
If that isn’t enough, there are also activities to be discovered throughout the maze. Along one stretch, a series of metal pipes, each a different length, are strung up along the path; when you walk along them, striking each with the metal rod provided, the pipes ring out a recognizable tune (we spent some time playing and replaying Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture).
At the gates to the maze, a camera obscura has been constructed inside a wooden gazebo where visitors can see images from the farm outside projected onto a white board on the floor. Perhaps not as artistic, but still a lot of fun, on the northern side of the maze there are a pair of potato cannons you can fire at a row of soup cans set up in another pasture.
Though unaffiliated with the museum consortium, the activities Sillin has assembled throughout Mike’s Maze offer a way of thinking about art and its relationship to the food we eat—a more tangible, first-person approach than you might find in a gallery exhibit. Instead of reflecting on the significance of agriculture in our Valley, looking at works of art behind glass or obeying “Please Don’t Touch” signs, at Mike’s Maze you are stuck out in a pasture surrounded by agriculture and full of activities you can’t keep your hands off. And if the connection between art and food still isn’t clear as you emerge from the maze, The Corn Cafe offers up a healthy selection of snacks, many of which are made from ingredients grown near by.
For a selection of images from this year’s edition of Mike’s Maze, please click on the thumbnails above.
