On a recent Tuesday night, artist Ana Prvacki spoke with Smart Museum student staff about her project The Greeting Committee that she is adapting for Feast. Ana talked about both the conceptual and personal scope of her project, and her interest in using slatko--a syrupy strawberry jam used in a traditional Serbian hospitality ritual--as a way to deal with ideas about social grace, etiquette, and institutional hospitality. She situated this both within her broader performance and participatory installation practice, in which she is generally concerned with daily habits and interactions, and within the context of her own international background as the child of a Serbian and a Romanian, raised in Singapore, and now living and working in L.A. In The Greeting Committee, slatko becomes at once a displaced instrument of a foreign, local custom, and a way to facilitate a generous interaction between Museum staff and guest.

The evening served as a preliminary training for student staff in how to serve the slatko to museum guests once Feast opens. It was also a chance to sample the batch of slatko that a crew of Smart Museum staff members (and Stephanie's mother) prepared for Ana's project this past summer. Eyes widened as students tried spoonfuls...

The consensus was overwhelming that the slatko is very, very sweet.