Artist-made desserts will be shown and eaten in New York gallery’s one-night exhibition

Summertime in New York City has been sticky lately, but it’s about to get sweet, too. On Saturday (28 June), the Lower East Side gallery Olympia will welcome guests to CAKE, a one-night display—and feast—of desserts donated by dozens of New York-based artists, among them Hannah Beerman, Mie Yim, Wells Chandler, Robin F. Williams, Hein Koh and Melissa Joseph. The ephemeral, edible show is a fundraiser for the small art dealership that will also function as participatory performance art. Buying a $45 ticket will get hungry guests access to indulge, and a Tupperware container for taking any leftovers that remain.

In an Instagram post, the gallery stated: “In a time when access, abundance and care are increasingly stratified, CAKE embraces the idea that some beautiful things are meant to disappear.”

The split-level gallery’s lower level will feature music by Olympia founder Ali Rossi’s childhood friend DJ Kit, plus drinks and decorative pinatas. The real spectacle will transpire in Olympia’s upstairs gallery, empty and painted pink “like a sweet box”, Rossi says. A long table will stretch across the centre of the room. Rossi adds that “another inspiration definitely is Last Supper”, referencing the Biblical scene famously painted by Leonardo da Vinci and countless others. (Coincidentally, the exhibition will feature 33 artists, matching the purported age of Jesus Christ at that Last Supper.)

A confluence of omens led Rossi to conceive of CAKE. Back in March, the participating artist Heather Benjamin brought cupcakes with toy cockroaches atop them for the closing of her solo show. Rossi had been yearning to work with the renowned “cake artist” Madeline Bach, who is perhaps better known as the Frosted Hag, too.

“I also thought about summer group shows,” Rossi says. “They tend, for me, to feel like fillers, because the audience shifts over the summer. So I was thinking about creating something that’s a little bit more community-centric, brings artists together, and is only one night.” All the desserts will be photographed before the eating starts, so the artists’ confectionary creations will live on in documentation.

The show’s unconventional and ephemeral nature allowed Rossi to bypass the hierarchies that would typically make it more complicated for them to work with artists represented by other galleries—though curatorial outreach started with Olympia’s roster and those artists’ friends. “I’m not consigning anything,” Rossi explains. “It’s this new channel.”

Melissa Joseph, the Uovo Prize-winning Brooklyn-based artist, will also mark her Olympia debut in CAKE. What’s more, it is her first time translating her felt-based practice into cotton candy. “I’m a mix of excited and scared,” Joseph says.

After experimenting with ways to adapt her baking practice for the white cube, Bach will contribute a real vanilla cardamom sponge cake with strawberry rhubarb compote, lemon mascarpone filling and strawberry buttercream. Bach rose to popularity amid the wave of cake-mania and messy aesthetics during the Covid-19 pandemic, but remains committed to the form long-term. Such trends “tend to fade”, she says, “which I was always worried about, because I never saw [baking] as a little stint”.

Fortunately, cake has staying power. Bach and her New York artist-baker peers continue moving desserts forward like any other creative medium. “It’s very interesting for people to see something that you wouldn’t expect to be able to be stylistically pushed in all these ways,” she says.

For Rossi, CAKE will be an experiment in crowdfunding and exhibition-making—as well as community-building. “There really aren’t any rules with this show, from the participation standpoint of what people are making, but also what our roles are as consumers,” they say. “I assume 15 minutes into this show, there will be someone that comes in who grabs a fistful of whatever dessert.”

• CAKE, 28 June, 6-9pm, Olympia, New York