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Northcoast Artists Gallery: 'Some like it potluck'
by Cliff Glover

The temptation comes when you cross the gallery's threshold on Friday or Saturday night and wander onto the floor of an art opening. Is it going to be the hors d'oeuvres or the art? Which one's first? Will my friend, whose art I'm coming to see, notice that I've made a beeline for the chips before dipping into his art?
Food has always been a bridge between art lovers and the artists themselves. On any gallery walk you can hear the whisperings of which gallery has the best spread to lure passerby into the show. Such is the focus on food that the members of Northcoast Artists Cooperative decided to create the "Hip Pocket PotLuck Cookbook.

The idea came to James Maxell and glass artist, Tangerine, during the cooperative's annual meeting where the issues of running a gallery are mixed, stirred, and simmered over long discussions. "It was obvious that people were here for the food and company, as well as to find out the date of his or her next show," explains Maxwell, lead coordinator on the project.

"I always wanted to do a cookbook. In Mendocino in the '70s I started a loose knit organization called the Eating Artist Talking Society, or EATS, primarily because we were the kind of artists who had the wherewithal not to be starving and we loved to get together."

In all there are 30 recipes in the cookbook," with full color pages of the artists' work and the tasty morsels they brought to each monthly meeting preceeding publication. "After the dishes were photographed, we had no truble comsuming every last crumb. We never had so many attend the meetings before," says Maxwell.

MendoLitho made the publication feasible because their new technology affored a limited, full color edition. Also, the cooperative saved on production costs by using coerced members to assemble and bind all the pages together.

Curiously, Maxwell thinks that putting out a cookbook is as risky as puytting out a work of art. "Ican remember bringing a dish to someone's house and noticing if people liked it and if they would bo back for seconds. On one level I feared my offering bight be rejected. On another level, I didn't mind because I could take the leftovers home.

"With food, with a successful recipe, you remember the experience in the same way you appreciate art. You take it in. You ruminate about it. Somebody may ask for your recipe, or if it's art they may like it enough to take it home. Sometimes they just stand there and spit it out if they don't like it. Hopefuldly, with the full membership testing these recipes, we won't thave that problem."

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