After the rabid success of artist Laura Ginn’s $100 five-course rat feast last week, which we bravely attended, gallery owner Allegra LaViola tells The Observer they will be offering an encore: free samples of rat meat to those who venture to the Lower East Side tomorrow from 6-8 PM. The simple “grilled rat sampler,” prepared by chef Yuri Hart, will be open to the public. Read More
Last night in the basement of the Allegra La Viola gallery on the Lower East Side, about 20 brave eaters gathered over five courses dedicated to one ingredient, providing the ultimate locavore eating experience a New Yorker could have: rat.
To participate in the evening’s program, a work by artist Laura Ginn titled “Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch,” they had each paid $100 to dine upon the ragged pests normally seen scurrying across subway rails and digging through garbage cans.
After attendees signed a generic liability waiver and agreed not to take photographs, the artist greeted them warmly, and watched with delight as the full spectacle of her outfit washed over them. The one-shoulder, knee-length cocktail dress was constructed entirely of two hundred rat pelts (tails and all), which she told The Observer she had tanned herself and stitched together over the course of two days. It was quite stylish, actually, with white fur at the top shading into gray fur at the bottom, a sort of murine ombre. Her toenails, peeking out from wooden platform sandals, were painted gray to match.
“I’m going to be on the cover of Vogue: the post-apocalypse issue,” she joked. Read More
