A collaboration began five years ago with an animated conversation between two artists/colleagues about their personal experiences withvrecipes from family and friends. The original project drew from the idea that a recipe is a microcosm that embodies identity, culture, and memory. By examining the evolution of the aurthors’ personal collections—clippings heirlooms, to screen grabs—the artists found relationships to time and space, embedded essences, and deep connections.
One’s memories included a cardboard box salvaged from some gift that her mother filled with a random selection of clipped recipes. For the other, recipes and images of prize-winners in 1950’s bake-off cookbooks have inspired projects where family secrets and financial gain are traded. The conversation continues and a partnership was formed to enlarge the dialogue and create art projects influenced by memories of food, friends, and family. The works include a handmade ‘cookbook/box’, site-specific installations, performances, projections, prints, and now a reification of the cookbook—the re-cookbook, which refers to the contents of the original artwork—the cookbook/box filled with simulacrum.
Like making art, a recipe is a blend of formula, code, inspiration, and performance—all subject to change for any reason. When a recipe is shared, the exchange is more than just a list of ingredients on paper complete with spills and smudges. They are encoded with ethnicity and a path to our pasts. More often than not, recipes evoke a dynamic range of emotions and are an expression of who we really are and where we come from.
The book is organized into two main sections—Criscola's and Fitzsimmons's—each includes snapshots of family and friends, recipes, personal ephemera like cookbooks and newspaper clippings, and satellite snippets to geolocate where a recipe came from. In addition, Fitzsimmons's section includes photographs she took of cookies she made from family recipes in 2015 and of her recipe book collection. Criscola's includes prints and posters inspired by and originally created for the Goffe Street Armory performance in 2014. The Re-Cookbook is designed and produced by Criscola's design studio, Criscola Design, and is published in partnership with Deborah Cannarella as the imprint OctoberWorks.

A Mouth Full: The Re-Cookbook

Arts & Photography

Criscola, Jeanne Clare

Fitzsimmons, Joan

Photography & Video

OctoberWorks

Our Community at Winchester: The City and its Workers at New Haven's Gun Factory is based on an exhibit produced by the Greater New Haven Labor History Association in 2013 about workers and the community they created at the Winchester Repeating Arms plant in New Haven, Connecticut, throughout the 20th century. Material has been added to the book based on new research. Some of the original information has been revised and/or expanded upon for clarity. 
The book traces the workers' long struggle to form a union as they were repeatedly met by powerful management intransigence and resistance. It follows the even greater challenges they faced as the company tried to break strikes, downsized, moved key operations out of New Haven, and repeatedly threatened to close if union members did not offer concessions. It examines the relationship between the City of New Haven and the changing corporate entities that operated the plant as loans and agreements based on guaranteed levels of employment repeatedly had to be amended or abrogated. Finally, it looks at the new "face of New Haven" in the 21st century as exemplified by Winchester Lofts and the companies now occupying Science Park where the factory buildings once stood. The book incorporates 18 interviews with former Winchester employees or their family members that reveal the mixed emotions that many had about their workplace.

Our Community at Winchester: The City and Its Workers at New Haven's Gun Factory

History

Cavanagh, Joan

Americas

Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights In City-States and Democratic Courtrooms

Resnik, Judith

Curtis, Dennis

History & Criticism

The story of how the work of one small group of people grew to meet the size of their calling: to ensure that Health Care is a Right, Not a Privilege. 
Peace & Health is the story behind this improbable effort: the 20-year-old who plants the flag in his small hometown of Middletown, Connecticut; the daughter of a sharecropper, who made her way north during the great migration and becomes the North Star of the drive to transform health in the community; the son of a Jewish émigré and pharmacist who breaks from his peers to support the cause; the musician who played in the big bands of the South in the 1930's, who loses his teeth and is now determined to make sure others do not lose theirs; and the college student and future US Senator who helps buy the building so the free clinic would not be shut down permanently. A young nurse-practitioner joins the organization as it expands beyond one Connecticut town, and today, CHC and its Weitzman Institute operate programs across the US, transforming the delivery of health care for populations who have been ignored.

Peace & Health: How a group of small-town activists and college students set out to change healthcare

Barber, Charles

Business & Money

In 1972, a twenty-year old college dropout had the radical idea to open a free clinic in his New England hometown. Without money or training, but raising the banner that "healthcare is a right and not a privilege," Mark Masselli faced down opposition from the local hospital and City Hall. As he established Community Health Center, Inc., he found partners in a faith leader, a nurse practitioner, and a future U.S. senator; joined forces with Wesleyan University students and neighborhood activists; and was inspired by the Dalai Lama and healthcare reformers around the world. Today, Community Health Center, with its Weitzman Institute and national "Conversations on Healthcare" podcast, is regarded as one of the most innovative health centers in the country and has a presence in all 50 states.

From the Deck: Poetry by Robert Brennan

Brennan, Robert

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Books by OctoberWorks