The Art Galleries at TCU present What’s for Dinner? Conflict & Consumption in American Food Culture. The exhibition will be on view at Moudy Gallery from August 24, to September 12, 2026. A reception will take place on Thursday, August 27, 5-7pm. What’s for Dinner? is co-curated by TCU MA Art History students Megan Brimijoin, Hannah Chock, Anly Do, Tori Gentry, and Laura Smith. What’s for Dinner? complicates food as an entry point into an investigation of American visual and material culture.

The artists in What’s for Dinner? Conflict and Consumption in American Food Culture approach food as both subject and system. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wayne Thiebaud foreground the visual language of mass consumption, transforming common objects into icons that reflect desire, excess, and commodification. Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns blur the line between object and meaning, using familiar materials to probe systems of value and commodity.

Expanding this dialogue, Ai Weiwei brings a global, political lens, addressing authority and power through material, while Harold Edgerton captures fleeting acts of consumption through experimental photography. Designers such as Tina Leser, Victor Costa, and Michaele Vollbracht extend these themes into fashion, where consumption is worn and performed. Contemporary artists—including Fernando Alvarez, Sheryl Anaya, Jesse Morgan Barnett, Freddy Ortega, and Adrianna Touch—anchor the exhibition in lived experience, emphasizing food as a site of memory, identity, and community.

The presentation of historical objects and publications, including a Vietnam War mess kit, helmet, and canteen, Best War Time Recipes, a Menu for TCU Special Train, and a Texas Christian University commemorative plate, grounds these broader critiques in the material realities of everyday life. These items trace how systems of conflict and consumption are not abstract, but embedded in the routines of eating, preparing, and serving food.
 

Programming to accompany the exhibition:

Thursday, August 27: A performance during opening reception by Sheryl Anaya constructs an immersive cardboard environment that blurs the boundary between stage and gallery, inviting viewers into a participatory performance centered on food, the body, and trust. Drawing on the ethos of Fluxus, Anaya’s work requires audience engagement, culminating in the shared act of eating as she transforms cream into butter and distributes it with pieces of bread. The remnants left behind raise questions about the status of performance objects: are they props, artworks, or relics

Saturday, August 29: Dr. Annette Becker, Curator and Director of the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas will give a talk about works loaned to the exhibition. Light refreshments will be offered afterward, followed by an artists’ panel discussion with Easyside artists Fernando Alvarez, Jesse Morgan Barnett and Adrianna Touch, and local artist Sheryl Anaya.

For programming updates, please visit https://www.instagram.com/tcuartgalleries/