The 2011 Project is a work by San Francisco artist Tofu. Each day in 2011 he created a 4”x4” mixed media piece. The finished project was made up of 365 smaller mixed media pieces. In 2013 the individual pieces will be distributed to project supporters. The project also acted as sketchbook for new ideas, which continue to be incorporated into new work For more information please visit 2011project.com
Today is the day to figure out what to do with the leftovers. During the course of the 2011 Project I have been saving unused scarps from the various mixed media pieces. The intent is to have them for a project archive. In the meantime some of those scraps have been used in other pieces for the project. Today’s casserole contains all scraps from some of the pieces made during the past 11 months.
If you were expecting a Norman Rockwellesque image of a turkey being carved, forget it. In my family the turkey tradition was all about a bad cat in the kitchen sink. No matter how you tried to stop her, every year Tara managed to get at the turkey while it was thawing. And every year there was a nice gouge in the back of the turkey like some sort of wound. Yum, raw, cold turkey.
The dinner guests had no idea, and what they didn’t know, didn’t hurt them. Plus Tara was a great cat. She lived nearly 20 years. This was back in the days when coyotes were unheard of on Cape Cod. She loved being outside and patrolled the neighborhood. Most every morning, except in the coldest months, she left a treat for us on the walk. No mouse was ever found in the house, nothing messed with the garden and the squirrels knew their place. Tara earned that hunk of turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s time to start getting ready for tomorrow’s big dinner. It also is time for the media to inevitably recycle the same, speculative stories about the first Thanksgiving and what was served at that meal. I think we can all agree that a cylinder of cranberry sauce didn’t shoop out of the can onto the plate back in 1620. But after that, the menu starts becoming debatable. It’s likely that the meal included quahogs, the hardshell clams common to the shores of southern New England. The inside of the clamshells are the source of one of the most beautiful and intense shades of purple found in nature. It’s that purple that was so highly valued. Quahog shells were cut and crafted into wampum beads by the Wampanoag and other Native Americans who made a home in a place that those other folks at Thanksgiving told them was called New England.
