Bravado, VSA Arts Revealing Culture, Smithsonian International Gallery, Washington, DC, cigars, tobacco and other media, 20″ x 20″ x 28″, 2010 (v. 2)

As an adult, before I ever started deliberately making art, I decorated cakes as a  hobby. For a while, I was totally into it and participated in quite a few competitions and won some nice prizes. Eventually though, I was bothered by the fact that I would spend weeks planning and executing a cake, only to have it consumed and gone in a matter of minutes, the only lasting legacy crumbs and photographs, and possibly a couple of pounds.

I turned to sculpture as a more archival medium. The cakes crept back in, though, and I discovered that the format of a cake is a remarkably effect vehicle for social commentary. We are conditioned to respond to a cake with positive, open, celebratory feelings. When you slip in social commentary, it glides right past our defenses and you have a conversation going.

I have mixed feelings about tobacco. I don’t smoke myself and won’t because of the health risks, but my father smoked cigars all my life until he had an abdominal aortal aneurysm caused by the smoking and had to stop. I really adored my Dad, in all his loveable but sometimes maddening imperfection, and the smell of cigar smoke provokes instant flashback to my childhood and feeling utterly loved and protected. This cake is built on a Styrofoam base but is composed of all kinds of cigars and tobacco. It was riotously fun to make and I actually had to make it twice.

I loaned the first cigar cake I made to Pop’s Safari Room in Fort Worth. Their air conditioning went out and the cake got hot and hatched out in tobacco beetles, which left little holes in a lot of the cigars and it basically fell apart.

In the meantime, I had submitted photos of the piece to a call for art for a VSA Arts exhibition planned to take place at THE SMITHSONIAN!!! It was a show called Revealing Culture for artists with disabilities. They accepted three of my cake sculptures and the cigar cake was one of them. There was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to exhibit at The Smithsonian, so I remade the whole cake.

Getting to do that exhibition was one of the highlights of my life. VSA Arts was originally Very Special Arts, an organization founded by former Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to help make the arts accessible for everyone. When use of the word “special” to refer to people with disabilities became out of favor, they changed the name to just VSA Arts and today it’s the Department of VSA and Accessibility at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

I think they accepted the work of about 50 artists in the Revealing Culture show and the pieces were installed at The Smithsonian’s International Gallery for a month. There was a wonderful opening reception at the gallery and of course everyone who could possibly make it attended, along with our friends and family members. It was JOYOUS. There we all were in our assorted disabled glory, surrounded by people who loved and supported us. We all knew this was a once in a lifetime experience and we kept beaming at each other like, “Can you f***ing believe this is happening?”