My Recipe our potluck
Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts Artist in Residence Exhibition
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, August 22, 6-8 PM
Join us for a joyous evening including a potluck, music, and art-making activities. Yuko and the Teen Artists will showcase their work and hold a discussion around food, culture, and belonging. The event is totally FREE, but please let us know if you’re coming!
Featuring artwork by the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts’ 2025 Artist in Residence Yuko Okabe and Teen Artists Enijae Booker, Jacob De Palm, Zoe Fernandez, Diana Gaspar, Aaliyah Levy, Lelio Leblanc, Laila Limontas, Dontaezjah Miller, Diligent Sankofa, Jewel Josephine Sims, and teen community members.
My Recipe, Our Potluck explores how our communities view cultural resilience and resistance through a lens of food and gathering. Using food as a storytelling vessel, Yuko Okabe and Teen Artists collected stories from each other and from community members through interactive workshops and translated those stories and observations into illustrated works.
They worked with and learned from community members who touch different parts of the food ecosystem—farmers, chefs, food vendors—as well as everyday people who need food as sustenance. Through these experiences, the artists learned about the technical aspects of how food travels through the industrial pipeline, while also discovering how they connect their identities and culture to food.
The Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts' Artist in Residence program engages a Boston-based artist each year to work closely with a group of Teen Artists to produce a body of public art with community engagement at its core. This year’s Artist in Residence is Yuko Okabe (she/they). They are an illustrator who uses art to spread awareness about topics surrounding affordable housing, healthcare, and community development. Now, as the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts' 2025 Artist in Residence, their residency project, My Recipe, Our Potluck, is tackling another major element of daily life: food!
Yuko has always been curious about food, so they jumped at the opportunity to explore the relationship between food, storytelling, and identity with this project. Growing up in a mostly white town in New Jersey, they had to contend with questions from classmates about the Japanese food they brought for lunch from an early age. But they were also an adventurous eater who has blossomed into a savory oatmeal connoisseur as an adult.
“My mom would cook mostly Japanese food, but she is also a very curious cook, so she would make things that were more like Chinese, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern food, or she’d make lasagna for Thanksgiving just because she wanted to,” Yuko said. “So, I think I got my curiosity about food and cooking from her.”
In recent years, Yuko has come to see food as so much more than just a delicious source of nourishment. They have found food and meals to be an ideal impetus for gathering and a powerful means for sharing elements of identity with friends, new and old.
“I’ll sometimes have themed lunch parties with friends,” Yuko said. “Those help me maintain a sense of community, and especially post-COVID, they helped me reconnect with people in a very simple and tasty way.”
Beyond their love of food, Yuko was also drawn to this residency by its community engagement element and the opportunity to learn from organizations in the food space.
“I got really excited about working with local organizations like The Food Project, which grows its own food, the Daily Table, which sells food, and the Boston Public Library, which invites the community to cook food,” Yuko said. “I thought that would be a fun way to see these different parts of the food system and then invite the teens to document it.”
The real-world application of art to impact and educate communities was part of what drew Yuko to a career as an illustrator to begin with. Since then, community engagement has become one of the central tenets of their artistic practice.
“When I got to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), I started seeing more opportunities for what art can do. There, I realized that you can make illustrations for books, games, or something that communicates affordable housing to people,” Yuko said. “That sparked my interest in how I could imbue my other interests into art and have a career.”
Being an active community member has always been part of Yuko’s life, but it didn’t begin intersecting with their art until their junior year of college, when they applied for the Maharam STEAM Fellowship through RISD, which challenged them to collaborate with an organization that didn’t typically hire artists. Yuko found Mightier, a company that was working with Boston Children’s Hospital to create a biofeedback game to help children with emotional regulation challenges and saw an opportunity to contribute characters and stories to enhance the game.
“I think that was the first instance of me realizing I can be an illustrator, but also have it influence something like healthcare,” Yuko said. “That was a really lovely experience, so from there I just wanted to find more opportunities like that, which led me to another fellowship about affordable housing with the North Shore Community Development Coalition, and eventually to opportunities like this residency at the Eliot School.”
Food has long sparked a spectrum of discourse focusing on nostalgia, scarcity, politics, history, artistry, and more. “Breaking bread” and meeting for a meal crosses various cultures, stories, and meanings. If we think of food as something that people share, consume, and digest, how can we ruminate on stories in a similar way?
My Recipe, Our Potluck will explore how our communities view cultural resilience and resistance through a lens of food and gathering. Using food as a storytelling vessel, the Teen Artists will collect stories from each other and community members through interactive workshops and interviews. They will speak with community members who touch different parts of the food ecosystem—farmers, grocery store owners, nutritionists—as well as everyday people who consume food as sustenance. They will learn about the technical aspects of how food travels through the industrial pipeline, as well as how we as individuals connect our identities and culture to food.
Together, Yuko and the Teen Artists will translate these stories and observations into illustrated works that use food ephemera, such as menus, recipe cards, and packaging, as framing devices. By using familiar designs that we associate with food, the Teen Artists can personalize and riff off these templates to create something in their own voice. At the end of the intensive, there will be a public exhibition and potluck where we will showcase these works and hold conversations around food, culture, and belonging.
Yuko Okabe (she/they) is an illustrator and cultural worker playing at the intersection of whimsy and community engagement. She has used art and design in her many cross-disciplinary experiences in affordable housing, healthcare, and community development. She also likes making characters, stories, curriculums, murals, and other colorful things.
Okabe holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her illustration practice received recognition from the Society of Illustrators NYC, Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles (SILA), Creative Quarterly, and 3x3 The Magazine of Contemporary Illustration. Through grants and fellowships, Okabe's community arts practice received support from the New England Foundation for the Arts, Tufts University Collective Futures Fund, Rhode Island School of Design's Maharam STEAM Fellowship, and the Enterprise Community Partners’ Rose Fellowship. Okabe is currently a studio artist at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is also an amateur oatmeal influencer @yukoats on Instagram and a member of her niece's highly exclusive sticker club.
