3rd Annual Open House — Community, Learning, and Fun!
High school students, parents, staff, college students, board members and special guests all enjoyed an amazing Saturday at BCAL.
It was the BCCP’s 3rd annual Open House. This year the goal was to have guests experience a typical BCAL Saturday. Six artists offered workshops ranging from electronic music to fashion to culinary arts to drawing, photography and product design. BCAL student ambassadors took guests on tours of the space, answered questions and talked about their experiences at BCAL and with BCCP in general.
Steve Ausbury, BCCP’s Program Director spoke eloquently about the philosophy and practice that drive the organization and result in teens feeling respected and heard in a supportive environment in which they can explore their interests and try their hand at a wide range of artistic endeavors.
Guests who had not been in the space since BCCP first took it over 5 years ago were amazed at the transformation from dreary old gymnasium to vibrant teen friendly arts and technology center.
The range of people who attended the Open House was as diverse as the workshops offered. They came from as far away as Larchmont, Yonkers and New Jersey and as close as down the street. But all the feedback was positive. Adults enjoyed the hands on experience of the workshops and sharing the space with the teens who attended. They especially enjoyed talking to the students and hearing what they had to say about BCCP and BCAL.
Guests were heard to remark on the fact that so many students would choose to come to BCAL on such a beautiful spring day.
All in all it was an extremely successful experience for everyone involved.
A student focuses on her fashion project.
Good times in the illustration workshop.
A self-portrait for the photography workshop.
Preparing food for the culinary arts workshop.
‘Kitchen’: A Culinary Odyssey
“It was difficult to get everything through customs,” says Thorsten Baensch of Kitchen – La Cuisine Transportable, a conceptual art project from Belgium. “We have almost 1,600 recipes now.”
Some of the recipes he and co-founder Christine Dupuis collect from people all over the world are pinned to the walls of a bizarre cardboard construction, a traveling kitchen they’ve taken everywhere from Manhattan to Munich. When they came to the Brooklyn College Art Lab in November, they made sure to save some room for new recipes. “They had a very nice setup,” said BCAL site coordinator Maresa Decena. “I’ve never seen anybody build a kitchen before.”
“We get simple recipes, we get elaborate recipes – it depends on the person,” says Thorsten. “In every country it’s different.”
Even the simple recipes have their own delightful mystique. When everyone at BCAL heard they were having soup for lunch, they probably expected something minor – peas and carrots or tomato. They were wrong: Thorsten was making squash soup, a foreign recipe he’d brought with him to America.
“Some of the students didn’t want to try it because they were wary of squash,” Maresa said, “but then they tried it – and they enjoyed it.”
Before long, Thorsten and Christine were serving a slew of curious teenagers, most of whom even came back afterwards for a snack at the dessert table.
Thorsten and Christine’s recipes are deliciously inventive: They turn their favorite foods into unique art, like a chain of bananas with numbers on them. Thorsten says that he and Christine try different ideas for almost every performance. “Once,” he remembered, “we did something with chocolate letters.” (Thorsten even pinned some of the letters to the wall so everyone could admire them, although he was nice enough to let people eat most of them afterwards.)
Since Thorsten and Christine created “Kitchen” in 2001, they’ve discovered enough recipes to fill five cookbooks, which were added to private libraries all over the world. They visited BCAL to get some ideas for the sixth, along with other local schools and galleries like the New York Public Library, New York University and the Goethe-Institut. They’re only going to a handful of places this fall (Malaysia and Singapore among them), but that should be enough to satisfy Thorsten: “Everybody has a recipe,” he says. “We almost use everything.”
Although everybody at BCAL had fun decorating the kitchen with drawings and pictures, Thorsten says the idea behind the project is to turn his recipes into a cultural experience: “It’s a social project, and exchange is at its center,” he says. “It’s the exchange that counts.”
To learn more about “Kitchen – La Cuisine Transportable,” visit www.kitchen-project.be/blog
BCCP Chefs Attend “School & Food Conference” at CUNY Graduate Center
The first ever “School & Food Conference” was held on April 1st at the CUNY Graduate Center and was attended by over 300 concerned educators, dieticians, school administrators, and agriculturalists. Among the inspired audience was Uni Lee, BCCP’s culinary arts instructor, and several aspiring chefs from the BCCP’s culinary arts program. Tanice Dean commented that she had never heard of food being described in this way – gaining insight into how food affects bodies and minds. Dean collected information from various groups such as School Food Plus and the Slow Food Movement, and even got some heirloom seeds for her family in North Carolina.
A key message of the conference was that better foods in schools will enhance student performance. Conference attendee Tyler Richardson asked the Department of Health to investigate his school’s cafeteria after gaining insights into the need for healthy eating options.
The BCCP crew took a break from the conference by taking a jaunt through nearby Koreatown for lunch. The students encountered a dazzling display of new and exciting foods. Lee served as guide explaining the some of these sights and smells. Storefronts offered views of chefs creating hand-made dumplings – which was replicated in a later class. The second part of the conference included workshops led by various educators including Uni Lee. One group that caught our attention was the Lower East Side Girls Club, who own and operate and youth run bake shop called Sweet Things Bake Shop. The culinary arts class will visit Sweet Things on Saturday, May 20th and talk to the youth that run the store about how they could start their own baking company. Remember: Students need to have a permission slip signed by the 18th.
