Ivan Day
Food Historian

For decades, food historian Ivan Day has worked with museums to remove objects from gallery display cases and to return them to their original context in spaces devoted to the consumption or production of food. In this lunchtime talk, he will focus particularly on his role as a guest curator at two exhibitions, both in North America. These were Supper with Shakespeare (Minneapolis Institute of Art 2012-13) and a permanent installation of an 18th century dessert table at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, he set up in 2015, which is still on display. 

Ivan Day is an independent historian of the social history and culture of food. He is celebrated for his reconstructions of historical table settings, which combine museum objects with accurate re-creations of period dishes. His work has been exhibited in many major museums in the UK, Europe, and North America, including the Getty Research Institute, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gardiner Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is an old friend of Bard Graduate Center; in 2007, he worked on a re-creation of an imperial table featuring a Meissen Parnassus by Johann Joachim Kändler for the BGC exhibition Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63.

Tuesday, March 28, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.