Manuela Is a Farm-to-Table Gallery For Hungry Collectors

Sara Messinger

Starving-artist clichés aside, most of the artists I know love to eat. Hard to swing an art handler at Lucien or the Odeon without knocking over at least one or two others. Many of them even love to cook, and since the dawn of the gallery scene, a number of them have used the restaurant as their canvas, from FOOD, where the avant-garde architect Gordon Matta-Clark used to dish out frogs’ legs in the ’70s, through Rirkrit Tiravanija’s ’90s restaurants-as-happenings, curry cooked out of 303 Gallery for all and sundry.