This article is part of our Design special section about how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.
In 2019, Jessy Slim, a Lebanese American designer, had just started a graduate architecture program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., when protests erupted in her birthplace, Beirut.
That October, thousands took to the streets in a revolt against the Lebanese government, a movement that ultimately led to the installation earlier this year of a new prime minister and president. Ms. Slim followed the unrest closely, while searching for a way to participate from a distance. To do so, she turned to a foodstuff emblematic of Lebanon: chickpeas.
“When I moved to Michigan, the first place that I explored outside of Cranbrook was Dearborn, where there are thousands of Middle Easterners,” said Ms. Slim, 34, who immigrated to San Diego from Beirut with her mother and stepfather when she was 10 years old, and now lives in Oakland, Calif., with her husband, Chris DeHenzel.
“One day, I went and bought a 50-pound bag of chickpeas, brought it back to the studio, and sat with it for a while,” she said. Eventually, she transformed the legumes into clay.
“I basically made hummus and then put it in the oven,” she recounted. Over the next few months, Ms. Slim hand-built and baked a series of Lebanese coffee ceremony objects, including a pot, cup and serving tray. She also made a small hanging sculpture from a chickpea textile she created by painting the legumes onto a gauze-like fabric. She mixed additives into the clay, including sand, glue and hibiscus, exploring how they affected its look, smell and performance.
Then, the pandemic hit. With her studio at Cranbrook closed for six months, she abandoned these experiments and headed to Beirut, where she photographed and videotaped the city, including the physical destruction caused by a chemical explosion at the city’s port in August 2020, creating what she called a “visual sketchbook.” She explored establishing a nongovernmental organization that would unite local architects and builders in reconstruction efforts and supervise distribution of aid in response to future disasters, but the task became too overwhelming.
When she returned to Michigan, her chickpea objects were in exactly the state she had left them, preserved and stable like any conventional pottery. The material became Ms. Slim’s primary medium for her artistic designs.
She was particularly entranced by the peaks, valleys and cracks in the hanging sculpture. “I started exploring it as a kind of landscape,” she said of the ravaged surface. “It’s almost like a mirror of what’s happening in Lebanon. The economic crisis and all the issues compounding there were traced in that material.”
For her thesis project in 2021, she created a large-scale installation of twisting chickpea sails across a Cranbrook gallery. Next month, she will have her first solo show at the Oakland gallery Roll Up Project (June 21 to Aug. 6).
Thought to be one of the first domesticated crops — evidence of cultivation in Syria dates to the 10th millennium B.C. — chickpeas have long been a staple of Middle Eastern cuisine. Gretchen Wilkins, the head of Cranbrook’s architecture program, noted that the foodstuff embodied for Ms. Slim “so much memory and connection with home and family.”
“But those connections also are challenging and difficult,” she added, because Ms. Slim is not in Lebanon.
Since graduate school, Ms. Slim has worked as an architectural designer while pursuing her artmaking on the side. In September, she participated in a San Francisco group show, “Works in Progress,” at which she exhibited “Nebula,” a swath of her chickpea fabric stretched over a curving stainless steel frame (created in collaboration with Estudio Material in San Francisco). She also showed a tabletop piece, “Chickpea Landscapes, 8,” that glowed delightfully from within with the help of a lightbulb.
Light is important to Ms. Slim’s work, she said, because of the attention it draws to texture. Asked if her illuminated object should be considered a sculpture or a lamp, she said simply that it was art.
“For me, Jessy’s work has a sort of stealth message in the guise of a minimalist object: It combines aspects of domesticity like cooking within a contemporary vocabulary,” said Squeak Carnwath, a painter who co-founded Roll Up Project.
“Whether it’s knitting, cooking, quiltmaking or ceramics, something that normally would be, or used to be, considered a craft is being elevated to its rightful place inside art,” she added. “Jessy’s work uses the language of craft coupled with abstraction.”
Amid war between Hezbollah and Israel, Ms. Slim has not been able to travel safely to Beirut for nearly two years, but is hopeful for Lebanon’s future in the light of its new government. “The past year is almost like a stamp that this work is important,” she said. “It has redefined those anxieties and feelings for me and allowed me to address my personal narrative: being an immigrant with two cultural identities that are never going to go away.”
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