(North Adams, Mass.) In summer 2000 MASS MoCA will offer a series of Feasts to please the palate and satisfy the soul. The series begins with a Soul Food Picnic with Sylvia Woods on Saturday, June 17 at 5 pm. On Saturday, July 8 at 5 pm culinary historian and author Elizabeth Jackson, will be featured in a Taste of Africa. Finally on Sunday, July 16th Joan Nathan will discuss The Origin of the Bagel at 1 pm. Each Feast event includes a cooking demonstration and a delicious dinner or brunch featuring the demonstrated recipes. The Feast series is sponsored by Philip Morris Companies, Inc.

Sylvia Woods, proprietor of Sylvia's, the premier soul food restaurant in New York City, will share stories of her extended and close-knit family. Her compelling rags-to-riches story begins in rural South Carolina where she and her family picked beans to make a living. She and Herbert, her husband of more than a half century, moved to New York and started a small luncheonette in Harlem. That luncheonette has grown into Sylvia's, the a landmark restaurant in New York City and has expanded with a branch in Atlanta. Woods is also the author of Sylvia's Soul Food : Recipes from Harlem's World-Famous Restaurant and Sylvia's Family Soul Food Cookbook : From Hemingway, South Carolina to Harlem.

The daughter of missionaries, Elizabeth Jackson grew up in the Kano area of Nigeria, just below the Sahara desert. She moved to the United States before going to college and eventually began reproducing the Nigerian recipes she grew up on. She has now put the fruits of this research into a rare West African style cookbook, South of the Sahara. According to the Reviewer's Bookwatch, "There's a relative shortage of African cookbooks in general, compared with other countries; what is available usually lacks the glistening photo-enhanced appeal of competing nations. Not so this guide: from its appealing dishes... to its photos, maps and recipes, this is a superior African cookbook indeed."

Nationally acclaimed cookbook author and host of the PBS television series Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan, will host a Sunday brunch and offer a rich tapestry of more than three centuries of Jewish cooking. Nathan lived in Israel for three years where she worked for Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem. She founded the Ninth Avenue Food Festival in New York and has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, Food Arts, Gourmet, and the B'nai B'rith International Jewish Monthly. Her book, Jewish Cooking in America, won the IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award for Best Cookbook of the Year and the James Beard Award for Best Food of the Americas Cookbook.

Tickets to each feast are $18. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office at 87 Marshall St. in North Adams from 10 am until 4 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413.662.2111 during box office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.

MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, is located at 87 Marshall Street in North Adams on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings. MASS MoCA focuses on the work of artists charting new territory; works that blur the lines between visual and performing arts; and works that have seldom, or never, been exhibited because of physical demands such as scale, materials, and fabrication methods.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katherine Myers
(413) 664-4481 x8113
katherine@massmoca.org