Happenings: Where Dinner Becomes Art

Happenings, First Iteration, May 2024. Installation view of Hafsa Nouman, Dastarkhwaan, 2024.
 

By TARA PARSONS January 13th, 2026

In 2024, arts professional Anna Yi Xie began to question what New York’s cultural landscape was missing. She kept returning to the same absence: the meaningful integration of contemporary art and dining. In the art world, the two most commonly intersect in museum and gallery dinners, where food serves as a decorative backdrop to networking among donors, critics, and collectors. Xie, joined by her colleague Kelly Chen, envisioned a different model, one that united early-career artists and chefs. From this shared ambition emerged Happenings, a project that repositions the communal meal as a site of experimentation.

The project’s name makes this ambition explicit. Borrowed from Allan Kaprow’s revolutionary 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Happenings echoes Kaprow’s desire to dissolve the distinction between art and lived experience. Like Kaprow’s incorporation of sensory cues such as smell, Happenings treats food as an active medium, allowing the act of eating to shape how art is understood. As Xie explains, “Art and food, separately, have been constants. It feels like the two can’t exist in the same frame without one overpowering the other. When they do appear together, one always seems compromised. Happenings is my attempt to break away from structure, hierarchy, and the idea of doing things the ‘right’ way within the context of art.”

Happenings, Third Iteration, March 2025, featuring Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Handle with Care, He Requested, 2025.

The initiative's first edition in May 2024 brought these ideas into practice. The evening paired emerging artist Hafsa Nouman, a Yale MFA graduate, with Joshua Pringle, a Culinary Institute of America-trained sous-chef at Jean-Georges. Nouman’s practice, which centers the Pakistani dinner table as a site of memory and social ritual, became the conceptual framework for the collaboration. Working closely with Pringle, she developed the menu. Then she incorporated the meal itself into her artwork by tracing the placement of empty dishes from each course onto the surface of her piece Dastarkhwaan. In doing so, the temporal experience of dining became materially inscribed within the artwork.

Pairings begin months before the dinners occur. While Xie identifies artists through studio visits, open studios, and online research, rigor, clarity, and theoretical commitment ultimately guide the selection. To complement the immersive nature of the dinners, Happenings prioritizes multimedia practices, deliberately pushing against the art world’s prevailing emphasis on painting. Meanwhile, chefs are selected primarily on word of mouth, technical skill, and sensitivity to narrative, material, and process. Once paired, the artist and chef worked in a sustained dialogue to ensure a genuine connection between the artwork and the menu. Events are ticketed to support production costs and provide participating artists with stipends, underscoring the project’s commitment to sustaining creative labor.

Happenings, First Iteration, May 2024, featuring Hafsa Nouman, Dastarkhwaan, 2024.

Subsequent editions have continued to refine this collaborative model. The platform’s third iteration, held in March 2025 at Chelsea Walls, paired Andrius Alvarez-Backus, a Columbia University MFA and Cooper Union BFA graduate, with chef Luke Troiano, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America trained at Atomix and Comal. While Alvarez-Backus’s work emphasized material transformation and process, Troiano’s menu echoed these concerns through flavor, texture, and technique, reinforcing the conceptual dialogue between art and food.

As Happenings moves into its next cycle, the project is no longer a novelty. In its earliest editions, the evidence was literal: the outline of a plate traced onto an artwork’s surface, marking where a meal once sat. That gesture captures the project’s insistence that art occurs with the act of eating.