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The CookBook LookBook Calendar Project

 

A 2025 wall calendar embedded with zines, created by an artist collective.

 

This year's cohort includes Monifa Kincaid, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Yvette MolinaAntoinette Ellis-Williams with Marlene Ellis, Krystle Lemonias, Melisa Gerecci, Meg Ellis, Ayana Kareem, Lisa Van Croft-Ellis, Natalie Duran, Bertha Miller, and Sophie Ziner. 

Pull pics apart!

As an artist-led project, CookBook LookBook is an intervention of an ephemeral nature that is radically accessible to public audiences.

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From wheat-pasting our stories across cities in the U.S. to teaching zine-making in urban gardens to donating to books-for-the-incarcerated programs, CookBook LookBook recognizes the radical power of women in community. When institutions fail, we embody institutional knowledge. 

Push pics around!

Our organizing concept is rooted in note-passing, album-making/scrap-booking/mix-tape-curating, chain-letter culture of the 1970s-90s. Its analog origins imbue the project with the intimacy of a personal invitation.

 

At the same time, it draws from the possibilities of the early internet: to reach out and connect with someone new or far away. It reclaims technological potential from algorithms, growing our connections in a human-centered, woman-driven manner of our own making. It respects time. Accordingly, CookBook LookBook folds the best elements of digital connectivity into analog exchange.

Larissa Velez-Jackson, Four Healing Porridges
Larissa Velez-Jackson, Four Healing Porridges
Larissa Velez-Jackson, Four Healing Porridges

Pull em apart

Our project celebrates the quiet potency of recipes and calendars: practical tools for household care.

 

As picture books, calendars are portable storytellers. As art galleries, calendars rotate displays through the year in our home or work spaces, merging with the household as we annotate them with personal notes. Users rotate them in private, yet together with others at month's end.

 

The pace of turning pages over the year shows us an overview of the present, future, and past. 

Re-layer pics! TAP!

Our collective is structured to live beyond its original creators and be self-sustaining. If you would like to participate in the next cohort, please reach out to megerecci at gmail dot com.

 

It faces the future, using memory and emotion—enhanced by smell, taste, and feel—to carry parts of the past forward. CookBook LookBook is an open, living archive, chronicling lived experience in a record of our own making.

artist collage photograph family  calendar
family art food zine
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