Visiting Artists: Joseph and Helena del Pesco

Joseph del Pesco is a writer, regular collaborator, and by some accounts, a curator. For more than a decade he’s been Director, and then International Director of KADIST—a network-driven contemporary arts organization with headquarters in Paris and San Francisco. He created the first international residency for art magazines, reimagined an historic artist contract to support a charity chosen by the artist, created a free-school by aggregating events across a city, and co-organized a conference at the New Museum exploring the future of NFTs. Earlier this year he organized a video exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, Mexico and this summer he’s co-curating a conference and screening event at the Centre Pompidou to survey critical perspectives on AI. For the past year he’s lived between Maryland, Barcelona and Mexico. In 2011 he also opened the restaurant LARDER with his partner (the chef) Helena del Pesco, which they ran together in Baltimore from 2019 to 2021. The following year they were invited to reimagine the cafe at the ICA in Richmond Virginia, and organized experimental pop-ups in Barcelona and Oaxaca.

Working with Kadist and independently, he’s organized numerous exhibitions and projects at institutions such as MOCA Cleveland, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Zabludowicz Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), almost always through some form of collaboration. He’s also been a guest of the following residency programs: Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland, SOMA in Mexico City, Beta-Local in San Juan, The Luminary in St. Louis, ArtPort in Tel Aviv, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in Torino. His writing has been published in dozens of catalogs, magazines, and books. His sold-out collection of short stories about imaginary museums, The Museum Took a Few Minutes To Collect Itself, was published by Art Metropole (Toronto) in 2018. His website: www.pleaseteleport.me

—

Helena del Pesco is an independent chef, fermentation teacher, and food business consultant. Chef del Pesco honed her skills working for restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area followed by travels to host dinner events at restaurants, museums and art galleries in Philadelphia, Mexico City, Puerto Rico, Barcelona, Oaxaca, Paris, Tel Aviv and San Sebastian, Spain where she worked in the kitchen of Arzak, a legendary three-Michelin starred restaurant. Her own Baltimore restaurant, LARDER, showcased locally grown organic produce, cultivated a rooftop herb garden, and sourced regenerative pastured meat. The LARDER menu regularly featured housemade kombucha, kraut, kimchi, garum, compound butters, salts and preserves. She’s now part of the leadership team of The Fermentation School, which offers her ongoing Fermented Apothecary course. Her background in art, including a MFA from UC Berkeley, brings depth and aesthetic consideration to her dishes, while having grown up with her hippy mother's whole-food cooking informs principles of nutrition and considered ingredients. Each seasonal menu draws on her panoramic experiences in Spanish speaking cultures (she’s fluent) and is imbued with a reverence for nature. She celebrates food and the ritual of a meal that brings stories to life.