Photo: Eugene I-Peng Tang
About
Sara Clugage is a New York-based artist, writer, and editor who focuses on economic and political issues in craft and food.
She is Editor-in-Chief of Dilettante Army, an online magazine for visual culture and critical theory. Although she works with food now, she was once a weaver, and she has always been a writer. Recently, she has been a culinary resident at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency (2024-25), Director of Communications for the Textile Society of America (2023-24), and core faculty for the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College (2021-23).
She is the author of many essays and one monograph: New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance, from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (where she now serves on the board). She is currently at work on a book about Jell-O, animacy, and abstraction.
You can contact Sara at: sclugage [at] gmail [dot] com.
Statement of Practice
I am an artist, writer, and editor with a curious range of interests that, for the past decade, have narrowed in on cooking as a form-giving activity. My work considers food as a material root of intellectual histories. I take cooking and eating seriously as a kind of knowledge production, connecting what we know in our guts with what we know about ourselves, our environments, and others. Our understanding of the world, no matter how theoretical or abstract, is formed through eating it.
Deep research often leads me to creative outputs, including performances and events. I have a driving curiosity about hospitality, especially the contracts, behaviors, and expectations of parties. From 2015-2019, I led a series of salon dinners that paired historical dishes with short lectures about alternative art economies from world history. This pairing of text with food has come to characterize my work. Feeding people allows me to create social situations that illuminate the complexity of everyday aesthetic experience. Parties are also, importantly, fun! Vitality and good humor make heady theories palatable.
Studying food is necessarily interdisciplinary, and my research extends into neighboring disciplines like political economy, visual studies, and craft studies. Although I rarely work in any of the traditional craft mediums anymore, I was once a weaver, and craft’s ideas around work and the aesthetics of labor are as embedded in my food work as they are in my textile work. I am at home in the craft field practically as well as philosophically, through teaching, editing, and board service.
I consider my scholarly work to be part of my artistic work and vice versa; writing often leads me to material research, which generates new concepts and questions. Since 2013, I have co-edited Dilettante Army, an online magazine for visual culture and critical theory. I am an avid essayist and lecturer, writing regularly for academic and general audiences on food, art, and aesthetics.
My current research concerns the significance of jelly to concepts of abstraction and liveliness. Jelly is bounded but undifferentiated, moving but not quite alive, with a texture uncannily akin to our own flesh. It is a substance we use to imagine ways of living at scales beyond the human. Jelly has wiggled from the kitchen into the library and laboratory, where thinkers have used it to conceptualize things too big to grasp (like empire and capitalism), things too good to be true (like technology and magic), and things too in-between to classify (like primordial forms of life). Recent jelly projects include Dessert Democracy (2020), a video work about powdered gelatin and wealth inequality; New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance (2022), a monograph and set of video works about cooking at craft schools, published by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; and World Building with Blobs (2024), a dinner about jelly and crystals held at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency.
CV
Current Position
Editor-in-Chief, Dilettante Army (2013–present)
Previous Positions
Director of Communications, Textile Society of America, 2021-24
Thesis Mentor, Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2024
Core Faculty, Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, 2020–23, Workshop faculty and mentor, 2019-20.
Visiting Artist, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, August 2021
Visiting Artist in Glass, Rochester Institute of Technology, November 2021
Organizer, Wikimedia NYC Craft+Wikipedia roundtable series, September 2021
Visiting Artist in Fiber, Maryland Institute College of Art, September 2021
Faculty, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Art Schools Collaborative, October 2019
Visiting Artist in Craft/Material Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, September 2019
Education
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MA in Visual and Critical Studies, 2011
California College of Arts and Crafts, BFA in Textiles, 2005
University of California at Santa Cruz, BA in Philosophy, 2001
Residencies
Ox-Bow School of Art, Culinary Residency, 2024-25
PRAKSIS Oslo, Party as Form Residency, May-June 2024
Banff Centre for Art and Creativity, Craft as Contemporary Art Residency, November–December 2019
Presentations
Podcast for Social Research Episode 87: Deviant Matter, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, April 2025
“Fried Jell-O: Demonstration and Concession at the Fairgrounds,” College Art Association conference, February 2025
“Syl Anagist Was a Garden: Food and Vitalism in The Broken Earth,” Oxford Food Symposium, July 2024
“Vital Matter: Jelly Molds and Colloid Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” College Art Association conference, February 2024
Podcast for Social Research, Episode 71: Cooking is Thinking — Rebecca May Johnson in Conversation, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, December 2023
“The Jell-O Cooking Show: Commodity Shortcuts, Magic, and Gimmicks in Culinary Work,” Biennial International Conference for the Craft Sciences, Craft Laboratory, Mariestad, Sweden, September 2023
“Against Craftivism,” Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, July 2021
American Folk Art Museum, Folk + Feminism Book Club, September 17, 2018
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, summer conference, July 2018
Craft and Folk Art Museum and College Art Association, CARPA panel, February 2018
California State University Los Angeles, guest lecture, February 19, 2018
Morbid Anatomy Museum, “Dilettantes: A Somewhat Professional History,” October 28, 2015
Publications
“Pay Attention,” The Vessel / Norwegian Crafts, April 2025
“Vampire Clubs,” Dilettante Army, Winter 2024
“Hear Me Now: The Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” review, Journal of Modern Craft, Spring 2024
“This is Not a Food Studies Program,” This is Not a Retreat, The MACR Papers, July 2023
New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, and Performance, monograph (print publication and accompanying videos), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, July 2022
“We Begin with Taste,” A Joyful Feast: Craft in Moments of Pause, MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College, June 2022
“Researching Radical Hospitality: A Conversation with Sara Clugage,” The Creative Instigator’s Handbook: A DIY Guide to Making Social Change through Art, ed. Leanne Praine, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022
“KHỔ QUA and Jiggle 1,” KHỔ QUA, April 2021
Care Is Like a Forest, artist-produced exhibition catalogue for Between You and Me, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2020
Radical Hospitality Trivia, Instagram stories trivia game, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2020
Dessert Democracy, video essay, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2020
“The Tent-Dweller: Markers of Migration in Art,” The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global; Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 16th Biennial Symposium (Founding Presidents Award nominee), 2018
“Nick Cave: Until” review, The Journal of Modern Craft, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017
“Fueling the Fires of Craft and Creativity,” Surface Design Journal, Fall 2016
“Piece of Me: Worship, Raveling, and Britney Spears,” Pelican Bomb, July 2015
“Reaching Behind the Glass,” Surface Design Journal, Fall 2014
“Inspired Design—Jacquard and Entrepreneurial Textiles,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 7, Issue 3, 2009
Exhibitions and Projects
Between You and Me, John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts, Sheboygan WI, August 2020-January 2021
Sprechgesang Institute—Courses, Block Gallery, Bronx Museum of Art, July 2019
Gilded Age New York: A Wealth Inequality Dinner, Cabinet Magazine, Brooklyn, January 2019
Sprechgesang Institute—Asterisms, Hercules Art Studio Program, New York, June 2018
Sprechgesang Institute—Extended Techniques, Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn, March 2018
Soviet Salon, Cabinet Magazine, Brooklyn, November 2017
Napoleon Salon, Thank You for Coming, Los Angeles, February 2017
2 Freaky 2 Friday, Pelican Bomb Gallery X, New Orleans, August 2016
CARPA, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland OR, January-June 2016
Camp CARPA, Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, October 2013