New Museum Announces Alice Waters as the 2011 Stuart Regen Visionary

The New Museum is pleased to announce that Alice Waters, chef, author, activist, philanthropist, proprietor of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café in Berkeley, CA, and internationally admired pioneer of the sustainable food movement, will give the third annual Stuart Regen Visionaries lecture on the evening of May 23, at 7 p.m. in the New Museum Theater. The Stuart Regen Visionaries Series honors individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture, and are actively imagining a better future. Waters, one of the most influential voices in food of the past fifty years, will discuss her remarkable career and share her vision for shaping a new generation's understanding of culture, food, and society for the future.

Alice Waters is an American luminary of a culinary philosophy who maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is "good, clean, and fair." Over the course of nearly forty years, Waters has helped create a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients to her restaurant, inspiring others in the food industry. Waters's commitment to education led to the creation of The Edible Schoolyard in 1996, a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Berkeley's Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. The Edible Schoolyard is a model public education program that gives students the knowledge to build a sustainable future by actively involving them in all aspects of the food cycle. In 1996, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Chez Panisse Restaurant, Waters established the Chez Panisse Foundation to support the Schoolyard project and encourage similar programs that use food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The success of The Edible Schoolyard led to the School Lunch Initiative, whose national agenda aims to integrate a nutritious daily lunch and gardening experience into the academic curriculum of all public schools in the United States. Currently, Waters is working on national policy by supporting the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, and believes that providing all public school students with free food in school would build the foundation for a healthier and more sustainable food culture in the US.

Waters is Vice President of Slow Food International, a nonprofit organization that promotes and celebrates local artisanal food traditions, and is the author of eight books, including The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution. She is an inductee in the California Hall of Fame (2008); a co-recipient, with Kofi Annan, of the Global Environmental Citizen Award (2008); and was the first woman to be named Best Chef in America by the James Beard Foundation (1992), among other accolades.

The Visionaries Series at the New Museum is made possible by The Stuart Regen Visionaries Fund, established by a gift from Barbara Gladstone in honor of her late son, founder of Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Additional support for the Visionaries Series is provided by the Charlotte and Bill Ford Artist Talks Fund. In spring 2009, legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones inaugurated this signature program, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia was the second speaker in the annual series

Visit newmuseum.org for tickets. $25 General Public; $20 New Museum Members. 

About the New Museum

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was conceived as a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding, dedicated building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of ongoing experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.