CLAMS is an ongoing, invitational dinner event inspired by Italian-American immigrant labor hxstories and the anarchists Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Since 2014, CLAMS has been hosted directly in my kitchen, in those of acquaintances (brand new ones as well as dear friends), in the Reed Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), The Carnegie Art Center (Covington, KY), and the Onofrio Gallery at Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN).

In the gallery setting, a sign-up sheet is posted on one of the gallery walls, open to the first people curious to sign-up and return at later set-date for a dinner of mussels (limited to between five to eight guests respectively per location).

Also on the wall in the gallery-setting is a slogan taken from Vanzetti’s organizing in 1916 with workers at the Plymouth Cordage Company in Plymouth, MA. Protesting unfair wages and long hours, the workers purportedly tied their dinner shells to sticks as noise-makers, marched in the streets, and shouted: ”We Can Not Live on Clams Alone!”

A historically affordable and at-hand meal for Italian-American immigrants in the early 20th century, my mussels dinners menus are modest in keeping with my kin. I prefer the events to remain undocumented, represented instead by the mussel shells produced from the dinners. To date the accumulation of noise-maker sticks in the 300s and represents symbolically, for me, an ever increasing potentiality of fellowship and protest.

The photos on this page are largely from the Rochester Art Center CLAMS event. Ongoing dinners enable me to collect mussel shells and construct replicas of the noise-maker protest sticks. And make friends and chart conversations around related topics. These protest-sticks then are what represents the collectivity at hand in this work (hxstoric and contemporary). They have been displayed in different configurations as a way to call upon these labor hxstories. The dinners also allow small groups of people to spend time together around models of community education, self-ideation, and intersectionality. A question that is posed to the groups: Can we imagine a society without a ruling class?

For the Rochester Art Center iteration, the tangram table was constructed by Welly Fletcher and the ceramic bowls by Erik Scollon.

Images above are mostly from one specific iteration of CLAMS at the Rochester Art Center, March 18, 2016. Photo credits: Erin Young