Omar Tate, Blue, 2024-2025

Artist and chef Omar Tate’s Blue draws inspiration from the color blue, a protective motif in Black American culture. With food, horticulture, and literature, Blue is a culinary offering that meditates on Black sustenance, presenting a reiterative monument that illuminates the complexity and humanity of Black American life, while ensuring the continued presence and survival of Black people, spaces, foodways, languages, and love.

The color blue is central to Hoodooism, a spiritual practice whose origins are traced to enslaved African American communities in the South, symbolizing and materializing the barrier between the spirit and earthly realms. In Hoodooism, the color blue protects from haints, or spirits who have the capacity to enact harm; the specific shade of “haint blue” is painted to cover architectural surfaces, vessels, and fabrics, offering protection to bodies and spaces. For instance, haint blue bottles are often placed at entryways or on trees in order to capture these spirits. Likewise, in music, poetry, and the visual arts, the Blues is a genre that expresses sorrow, humor, and healing, becoming, what Tate calls, “an endemic protector of Black sanity” that endeavors to “sustain the health of Black folks” in oppressive conditions. 

Blue is a sixteen-month residency that consists of an evolving dinner menu that testifies to the various reinterpretations of haint blue that emerge at Grounds For Sculpture and its broader environs. Moreover, Tate, who is co-proprietor of Honeysuckle Provisions in Philadelphia alongside his partner Cybille St. Aude Tate, is collaborating with Grounds For Sculpture’s horticultural team to grow a “hoodoo-inspired garden”—a living sculpture with plants selected by Tate in connection to his theme. Through this multidimensional practice, Blue reflects on the role of sound, taste, sight, and smell in memory-work, forging a monument that honors the multiple roots that constitute Black history and experience.  

Materials: Installation in the Domestic Arts Building: plantings and blue bottles

Credits
Project manager: Gina Ciralli 
Slow Motion curated by Patricia Eunji Kim for Monument Lab

Omar Tate (Born in 1986 in Philadelphia, PA; he/him) is a Philadelphia rooted artist and chef. Omar has worked fifteen years in the restaurant industry in New York City and Philadelphia, where he noticed the lack of representation of African Americans and people of color in the kitchen and on the plate. In 2017, he decided to tackle this imbalance by broadening the scope of his work to include his practice as a visual artist and writer. In 2018, Omar launched Honeysuckle Pop Up as a traveling dining concept, using food and art as vehicles to explore several nuances of contemporary Black life and culture. Honeysuckle has received critical acclaim as both a food concept and a leading philosophy of the future of food in America. Partnered with his wife, chef Cybille St. Aude-Tate, Omar launched Honeysuckle Provisions, their Afrocentric grocery and cafe in West Philadelphia. You can find Omar’s work featured in The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, Okayplayer, Eater, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. 

Follow Omar Tate on Instagram @coltrane215 to learn more.

Major support has been provided to Grounds for Sculpture for Slow Motion by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Brooke Barrie Art Fund, NRG Energy, and Julie and Michael Nachamkin. Additional support has been provided by the Atlantic Foundation, Holman, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and New Jersey Department of State. 

Image Credits

• Omar Tate, Blue, 2024-2025, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, Slow Motion curated by Patricia Eunji Kim for Monument Lab (photo: Bruce M. White)

• Omar Tate, Blue, 2024-2025 (detail), Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, Slow Motion curated by Patricia Eunji Kim for Monument Lab (photo: Bruce M. White)