HOW TO GO
What: Julie Green’s “The Last Supper: 600 Plates Illustrating Final Meals of U.S. Death Row Inmates.”
Where: The Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park North, Dayton
When: Through April 12. Hours are 11 .m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Extended hours until 8 p.m. on Thursday.
Admission: Included in museum general admission of $8 adults, $5 seniors, active military and groups; free for DAI members, youth (17 and under) and college students.
RELATED: Guest curator, Judith L. Huacuja, will host a gallery talk entitled “The Last Supper: A Humanitarian’s Approach to the Death Penalty Debate,” from 4-5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 25 at the DAI. The symposium is free to UD students and DAI members, and included in the museum’s suggested general admission for non-members.
VIDEO: Guest curator Judith L. Huacuja talks about ” The Last Supper” currently on view at the Dayton Art Institute.
At first glance, the lovely blue-and-white plates that grace Dayton Art Institute gallery walls appear to be an historic collection of fine china — antique Chinese perhaps, or Staffordshire Transferware. Is it Spode? Blue Willow?
A closer look proves eerie. The decorative plates are actually filled with food; each represents a final meal requested by a death row inmate before execution: fried chicken and watermelon, a pack of Pall Malls; one bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers; one jar of dill pickles.
The dramatic exhibit, entitled “The Last Supper: 600 Plates Illustrating Final Meals of U.S. Death Row Inmates,” is being presented locally by The Dayton Art Institute and the University of Dayton. Artist Julie Green, an art professor at Oregon State University, identifies each of her plates by the execution date and last meal.
The local exhibition is guest-curated by Judith L. Huacuja, chair of the Department of Art and Design at UD. The goal, she says, is to provoke conversations about the death penalty.
“Art helps us to think about issues,” said Huacuja, who began her DAI staff briefing last week with a personal story. While working at a 7-Eleven at the age of 20, her twin sister was shot by someone who came to rob the store. She barely survived.
“For years, we both lived in a lot of anger and fear. They never found him,” Huacuja told the group. “We must keep the families and victims in mind.”
Visitors will see a listing of states and number of executions on the gallery wall. A gallery guide describes the meals on each plate. No names are ever used.
In her comments on the exhibit, Huacuja writes that art — as exemplified by “The Last Supper” — “has a tremendous capacity to explore complex issues, move audiences towards seeing new perspectives, and motivate people to create social change.” She believes the artist is asking us to contemplate the American capital punishment system and the contradictory and yet ritual acts of gifting and suffering embedded within the system.
“Similarly, she seeks to highlight the life-affirming act of offering a final meal, and the irony of the act of execution that follows,” says Huacuja.
The exhibit also suggests parallels between Christ’s Last Supper and an inmate’s last meal.
How it began
Green, featured recently on PBS NewsHour, says the idea for her unusual project came while she was working at the University of Oklahoma and read a newspaper story about an Oklahoma inmate’s execution. In addition to details about his crime, the story included his final meal request: “Three fried chicken thighs, 10 or 15 shrimp, tater tots with ketchup, two slices of pecan pie, strawberry ice cream, honey and biscuits, and a Coke.”
That startled Green who hadn’t previously heard of such requests. “I started clipping them out of the newspaper, and then I talked to colleagues and friends who didn’t know about this ritual of final meals, as I didn’t,” she says. “I realized there was a lot of confusion about capital punishment and I wanted to get that conversation going and have people be more educated. So I started doing those drawings.”
Although the United States is considered a death penalty nation, she discovered executions are rare or non-existent in much of the nation. Twenty-five of 53 jurisdictions in the U.S. (50 states, the District of Columbia, the Federal Government, and the Military) either do not have the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in at least 10 years. Since 1976, there have been 53 executions in Ohio.
In her artist statement, Green says the final meal requests humanize each death row inmate. Initially, she says her goal was personal meditation as she contemplated the reason for final meals, the system of capital punishment, and the margin of error.
Though at first she tried using embroidery to convey her message, Green decided it wasn’t appropriate long-term. When she moved to Oregon from Oklahama she immediately called Toni Acock at Mineral Valley Painters for advice.
“I thought it would make sense to paint meals on a plate,” Green says. “The color blue seemed appropriate for both its beauty and its sadness.” After applying cobalt blue mineral paint to second-hand ceramic plates, technical advisor Acock kiln-fires the plates to 1,400 degrees.
Although as a child, she shared her family’s support for capital punishment, Green has since changed her opinion and plans to continue making plates until capital punishment is abolished. She says the requests provide clues on region, race, and economic background.
“More broadly, the goal is to encourage dialogue and to end the project and stop making plates,” Green says now.
What’s on the plates
“In states with options, most selections are modest,” Green writes. “This is not surprising, as many are limited to what is in the prison kitchen. Others provide meals from local venues. California allows restaurant take-out, up to $50. Pizza Hut, Wendy’s and Long John Silver’s are frequently selected in Oklahoma, where their $15 allowance is down from $20 in the late 1990s.”
Green says the reaction to her traveling exhibit has been “wonderfully varied” and has triggered “huge conversations.” That’s certainly evident at the DAI where you’re likely to hear chatting in the gallery and where many have signed the guest book to share their thoughts and reactions. Some museum-goers are filled with compassion for the inmates; others are irate.
“A viewer who comes convinced they are against the death penalty should know something of the circumstances,” one woman wrote. “The man who got the birthday cake rang an elderly neighbor’s door and stabbed the man to death on the doorstep in order to step over his body and steal a television. The ‘Lasagna and Dumplings” man shot a 39-year-old minister in the back of the head to ‘see what it felt like to kill someone.’ “
Another visitor wrote that it was inappropriate to compare Jesus Christ to a murderer by referencing “The Last Supper.”
“The reactions to the exhibit are actually reactions to capital punishment and that’s great because art can be a catalyst for conversation and I feel very pleased that it seems that this exhibition has done that,” says Green, who dedicates half of each year to the ongoing project. “It’s an ongoing challenge. It takes a certain emotional head-space to work on a project with this much sadness to it, but I ultimately feel it’s helpful in creating dialogue and that keeps me going.”
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