Dinner’s Ready!
Setting the table for Dinner’s Ready! at Summertime Gallery by Grant Scott-Goforth
An eye-popping smorgasbord might have surprised someone walking down an unassuming Brooklyn street this spring.
A sherbet-colored riot of shapes and colors, a vast buffet of outlandish and familiar foods, popped from behind the windows of the narrow Summertime Gallery.
The tablescape was the result of a months-long group residency of YAI Arts artists, a retro-tinged, intimate, and extraordinary installation of 3D and 2D art and personal objects arranged into a surreal and welcoming dinner party.
L to R: Priscilla Frank, Mallory Perry, Anna Schechter, Jimmy Tucker, and Sophia Cosmadopoulos
Summertime Gallery, founded in Williamsburg in 2019, is a unique creative space with a mission to support artists who are neurodiverse or who have intellectual disabilities, while aiming to help people look beyond those labels to identify them simply as artists.
Founders Anna Schechter and Sophia Cosmadopoulos draw on their experience working in supportive art studios to provide mentorship and support, focusing on increasing access between artists and the communities they want to inhabit. They advocate for a full experience as a working artist, providing opportunities to build community, create, curate, and sell art, teach classes and host workshops, and explore any other aspects of the art world that interests their artists.
“We want to provide an immersive experience,” says Cosmadopoulos, “with artists at the forefront of the decisions about their art.”
Schechter and Cosmadopoulos launched a residency program in June 2020, eager to explore what they could offer in the face of a global pandemic. They offered artists 3-4 months of solo access to their studio, with staff mentorship and the opportunity to exhibit their projects. It was a big success, and the program continued with solo artists until this year when they hosted the 14-person group residency that culminated in Dinner’s Ready!, which showed March-April 2023.
The show was conceived in the summer of 2022, when YAI Arts, a New York City organization dedicated to artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities, reached out to Summertime Gallery about the possibility of a show about family.
We had an amazing initial brainstorm [with the artists],” says Schechter, exploring songs, smells, experiences, and other things that evoked family. They all define family differently: “it may be biological, chosen, friends, imaginary anime characters.”
The conversation also touched on the range of emotions associated with family. “Some people feel warm and fuzzy, some feel grief for losses. The complexity of the conversation about the theme was really beautiful.”
The group coalesced around food as a common family theme. It was a subject many of the artists already explore in their work, and they landed on a title recalling a familiar household evening time shout: Dinner’s Ready!
Germantown in the Summertime, marker on paper, 9 x 12 in, 2023
Artist Lauren McArthur
As preparation for the residency began, Jimmy Tucker, a YAI Arts artist and former Summertime Gallery board member, expressed an interest in curating the show. Schechter and Cosmadopoulos were able to secure a stipend for him to co-curate, and they all began to focus the vision of the show, poring over retro cookbooks and visiting artists’ homes for inspiration.
Artist Larry Willoughby Jr.
As the exhibit took shape, they imagined transforming the gallery space into a fantasy home, a captured moment of a family meal, with homey objects on the peony-pink walls and a “pastiche of vignettes”—onions, a grandma’s gold tissue box, palm crosses, a mother’s rosary, and other evocative and nostalgic objects.
“We wanted to create warmth and the feeling that everybody is invited,” says Cosmadopoulos. They built a fireplace and made keys to sit in a dish next to the door—“the little details that made it feel like a home. That was a really fun thing to think about— the smells, the lighting.”
And of course, the dinner table, which was covered with papier-mâché lobster, fish, and cakes, and sour cream, cocktails, and cupcakes crafted from spray foam all with bright paint and foil.
“Cannoli—so many cannoli,” Schechter says with a laugh.
Tucker, Schechter, and Cosmadopoulos worked with artists to price and name the works, focusing on affordability and encouraging trades for them to take each others’ works home.
The opening was an exciting, celebratory evening with (real) Shirley Temples and tater tots for guests, who mingled with the artists and absorbed the atmosphere.
Throughout the month-long exhibit, they emphasized public programming. “We had a few groups come in and really engage—it feels alive and communal,” says Cosmadopoulos. “They weren’t just coming to see the work, but taking it in and feeling inspired by it and learning from the artists.”
Dinner’s Ready Press Release Detail: Everette Ball
L to R: Diogeneis Costa, Jennifer Quinones, Lauren McArthur, Oswald Saenz, Anna Shechter, Jimmy Tucker, Sophia Cosmadopoulos, Everette Ball, Mallory Perry + Priscilla Frank
The exhibit came to an end with a cherry on top—a jubilant dinner party for the artists and one person from their chosen family at Panna 2, a NYC Indian restaurant famous for the joyous anarchy of string lights, flags, beads, and other dazzling ornaments hanging from the ceiling and walls.
“We wanted the restaurant to be a place that felt as inspired as the show,” Schechter says. “It was a big, beautiful celebration of the artists and their work.”
Tucker made handmade place cards for each artist, and gave out ketchup and mustard bottle trophies tailored to their accomplishments and personalities.
“The artists spoke on their experiences thinking about and defining family,” Schechter says. “Because of COVID there was such minimal opportunity to break bread, such a simple and profound way to connect with people.”
