Alumni Spotlight: LA Times Features MFA VS Alumni Ray Anthony Barrett
May 02, 2019
Our alumni take many creative paths! At the recent Los Angeles debut of the Frieze art fair, Barrett's soul food pop-up Cinqué was among a select group of culinary projects featured on Paramount's backlot. The Los Angeles Times took note in this feature on the artist turned chef.
"Barrett calls his food project Cinqué because he is Ray Anthony Barrett V but also as reference to Joseph Cinqué, the West African man who led the 1839 revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad."
After completing his MFA in Visual Studies at PNCA in 2011 Barrett moved to LA. He has had a number of exhibitions and works as art assistant to the artist Mark Grotjahn, but as the article notes, what he has been focused on for the last five years is cooking. He cites the process of and amount of research that goes into making art as translatable into the research that goes into developing recipes. He grounded the research in family recipes such as one for a traditional hoppin’ John.
Barrett's first pop-up was last year at LA's Underground Museum, the renowned art center founded by the late Noah Davis.
Learn more about Cinqué.
Learn more about Barrett's art on his website.
Read the whole article in the LA Times here