A recipe for a scientist is a how-to guide; when engaged with humanities, that recipe is a poem, a declaration, a history, a linguistics manual. A seed for a farmer is a starting point; and when situated within cultural knowledge and political lives, seeds become sacred ancestors and active protesters.

Food & Memory, hosted by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, the third and final conference of Rethinking Place, and aims to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making past, present, and future.

The past two Rethinking Place conferences have engaged with themes that apply to our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players – recipes and seeds can be seen as living archives, sites of research, and modes of knowledge production. Continuing with the vein of place-based understandings put forward by the 2022-2023 Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Center for Human Rights and the Arts COMMON GROUND biennial, the Environmental and Urban Studies classes and programming, the Bard Farm, and existing partners, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory. 

The conference brings together agricultural workers, chefs, food systems scholars, and artists to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion. Situated on the banks of the Mahicantuck (Hudson River) in a time when current food systems, planetary health, and direct violence pose existential threats to the sovereignty and wellbeing of many, Rethinking Place aims to center a diverse range of voices and histories that have touched and formed the current agricultural region of the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Free registration available on Eventbrite via the link below. Please note that each day requires separate registration.

Lucille Grignon

My name is Lucy Grignon. I am an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation. Muh-he-con-ne-ok being of the People of the Waters that are never still, and Menominee being of the Ancient movers. I am a passionate community-taught chef, educator, teacher, Momma, photographer, artist, writer, doula, and advocate for my community and the world around me. I am developing my relationship with Grandmother Earth. My family owns an Indigenous Homestead called Ancient Roots in Bowler, Wisconsin. We research traditional gardening practices from our ancestors dating back to ages ago to the present day. We use a combination of their methods to learn, preserve, grow, seed save, reconnect, and share. We are working to reconnect to our cultural inheritance through the land, plants, medicines, and wildlife. I recognize my connections to my Indigenous roots come in many forms, from our language journey to the stories of our elders, our people, and our healing.

Vivien Sansour

Vivien Sansour is an artist, researcher, and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world to preserve ancestral seeds and biocultural knowledge. Her work as an artist, scholar, and writer has been showcased internationally. Vivien was most recently the Distinguished Artistic Fellow in Experimental Humanities at Bard College, and is currently the Executive Director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library.

Jalal Sabur

In 2010, Jalal Sabur began farming with Wassaic Community Farm – growing produce for farmers markets while running a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and gleaning project. While at Wassaic Community Farm Jalal co-founded the Freedom Food Alliance and the Victory Bus Project. The Freedom Food Alliance is a collective of small rural and urban farmers, activists, artists, community folks and political prisoners who use food as an organizing tool. The Alliance founded the Victory Bus Project to connect urban and rural communities and to support families of prisoners by providing transportation (along with a box of farm-fresh food) for folks visiting prisoners in the Hudson Valley. In 2013, Jalal started Sweet Freedom Farm to grow and aggregate vegetables, grains, herbs, and maple syrup, prioritizing the folks impacted by the prison system. Sweet Freedom is also a training site for young Black farmers, a gathering space for partnering projects in the alliance, and building a Grow Food, Not Prison movement.

Kenny Perkins

Kenny Perkins is the Project Manager at Akwesasne Seed Hub, an organization that “ASH LLC seeks to empower our Mohawk and wider Haudenosaunee communities to practice embodied self-determination through the reclamation of our traditional foodways and language. Focusing on scaling up traditional food and seeds to make them more widely available to our Mohawk community and engaging in strong language immersion and intergenerational mentorship ensures that we are making traditional healthy foods and seeds and the skills needed to cultivate them in our daily lives more widely available to the community. This allows for growing the next generation of land, food, and seed stewards who are fluent in our language and have a strong cultural cosmovision to birth a chapter of sustainable health for lands, people, and all our relations, which culminates in the dignified resurgence of a healthy, resilient and sovereign Mohawk Nation.”

BEM Bookstore

Tatiana Blackhorse

Frances Cathryn

Frances Cathryn combines archival research, media theory, and social design to recontextualize American cultural narratives. Her cultural criticism on topics ranging from the myth of American exceptionalism to marginalized historical landscapes has been featured in such publications as Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews, the Brooklyn Rail, and Social Text journal. She currently manages editorial projects at Forge Project, where she coordinates publications, advises writers-in-residence, authors a monthly newsletter, and leads its digital-first journal, Forging.

Misty Cook

Misty Cook (Davids), M.S., is the author of Medicine Generations, Natural Native American Medicines Traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Tribe. Cook studied these medicines for over seven years to complete this book, enjoying every minute of it. This includes searching for them, identification, gathering, drying, preservation for use throughout the year, preparation and having them available for those who need them. She is also a cultural consultant with a masters in management providing diversity training on many topics including Native American students in education, Native American history, Native American games, and of course, Medicines.

Choy Commons

Choy Commons is a nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast. Learn more at https://www.choycommons.org/. 

Nathan Kleinman

Stephanie Lee

Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee is the director of the Office of Human Resources, a critical design studio that explores the intersection of spatial, racial, and material politics as a liberatory practice. Her current project builds a comparative genealogy of radical ruralism, from early abolitionist communes to social justice-based farms throughout New York. As the Strauch Early Career Fellow at Cornell University, Lee’s teaching and research focus on utopian agrarian projects, botanical histories, and rural commons as topics of design-research. Previously, she was awarded the inaugural Architecture Fellowship at Bard College and the 2020 Fellow for the Future Architecture Platform. She participated in residencies including the Arts Center Residency supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Architecture Residency at Art Omi. She has exhibited her work at Haus der Architektur in Graz, Austria, and citygroup gallery in New York City. Her writings and interviews have been published in Koozarch, The Funambulist, PLAT, and Archifutures (dpr-barcelona, 2020). Stephanie received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Studio Art at Wesleyan University and holds a Master of Architecture from Rice University.

Sage Liotta

Farah Momen

Farah Momen (she/her) is an entrepreneur and chef exploring the ways in which food experiences can be a healing, reflective, connective tool for individuals from all walks of life.

She is the co-founder of The Now Exchange, an NGO that fosters health access and choice in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Farah is a native of New York State, currently residing in Massachusetts with her husband Matthew and kitten Ellie Roosevelt. She was a Season 1 cast member of Top Chef Amateurs on Bravo TV paired with mentor Chef Melissa King.

Lana Mustafa

Lana is a Palestinian-American farmer, seed protector, beekeeper, and Executive Director of Montclair Community Farms. She is also the founder of Roots of Resilience, a Mutual Aid initiative supporting farmers in the West Bank. Lana, a mother of three, was born in New Jersey and spent her childhood and adolescence between the U.S. and Mukhmas, a farming village in the West Bank where her family has lived for many generations. 

With an immense love for nature and deep roots in Palestinian farmland, Lana is passionately dedicated to advocating for food sovereignty and to nurturing sustainable agriculture here and abroad. 

Lucas Ondak

Lucas Ondak is a transexual curator and artist from Edmond, Oklahoma, the occupied land of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita people. They are committed to working with contemporary art and artists who consider the lives and experiences of the prairie region, particularly work that centers on decolonization and queer liberation. He is a recent graduate from the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people where they researched queer art history, contemporary Indigenous art, and 20th and 21st century photography.

Justin Paulino

Tara Rodriguez-Besosa

Ozoz Sokoh

Leila Stallone

Leila recently graduated from Bard College in 2024 with a degree in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. In 2023, they joined Rethinking Place as an Engagement and Education Undergrad Fellow. Through their fellowship and collaboration with the Research Fellow, they started a place-based research project, facilitated workshops, and helped maintain the Bard Farm Natural Dye Garden. In 2024, Leila submitted their Senior Project titled: “Farm Against This Mad World: An Ethnographic Glimpse into an Alternative BIPOC-Centered Farm Community in New York” which explored how the action of small-scale farming can be an action of community building and an act of resistance against capitalist agricultural systems. This past summer, they were selected to be an Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund Apprentice and spent a month at Winona LaDuke’s Hemp and Heritage Farm on the White Earth Reservation. Leila continues to think about the relationship of land and living histories as they continue to study food systems and through research at the Minnesota Historical Society where they are helping to create a Queer Digital History Map.

Maggie Thomas

Marie Watt

Marie Watt (b. 1967) is an American artist. She is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians (Turtle Clan) and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Haudenosaunee protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

Olson, Sara Calvosa (Karuk), Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen

Bitsoie, Freddie (Navajo) & James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian

Weso, Thomas Peore (Menominee tribe), Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir

Webster, Rebecca M. (Oneida), Our Precious Corn: Yukwanénste

Oden, Loretta Barrett (Potawatomi tribe), Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine

Pesantubbee, Michelene E. (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) & Michael J. Zogry (editors), Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods

All texts are available at the Bard Stevenson Library.

TRAIN: Bard College is a 15 minute drive from the Rhinecliff Amtrak Station.

TAXI:

• HVA Taxi Service, 845-867-8257
• Red Hook/Rhinebeck Taxi, 845-876-2010
• Around the Corner Taxi, 845-224-4760

Accessible on Bard Shuttle:

Hotel Tivoli, Tivoli

The Grand Dutchess Inn, Red Hook

Red Hook Country Inn, Red Hook

Within a 15-20 minute drive:

Beekman Arms & Delamater Inn, Rhinebeck

Courtyard by Marriott, Kingston

Hotel Kinsley, Kingston

Find Olin Auditorium:

Find Finberg House:

Find the Stevenson Library: