As museums grapple with welcoming back visitors in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has unveiled “Reclamation: Recipes, Remedies, and Rituals,” an exhibit that takes place entirely online.

“Reclamation” pairs work by nine interdisciplinary artists with recipes and stories submitted by people from around the world. While it officially opens Jan. 18, 2021 and runs through Dec. 31, 2021, the exhibit is already accepting submissions. It’s part of the museum’s Women, Arts, and Social Change program, which began five years ago as an inquiry into cross-disciplinary collaboration between female artists and female leaders.

Melani Douglass, the museum’s director of public programs, curated Reclamation—but she says she challenges the traditional divide between curation and creation. “I wanted to eliminate or complicate this idea of who is a curator and who is an artist,” she tells DCist over email.

For the exhibit, Douglass chose women whose artistry spans fields and practices: chefs Jenny Dorsey and Lauren Von Der Pool, dancers Sharayna Ashanti Christmas and Djassi DaCosta Johnson, community artist Aletheia Hyun-Jin Shin, performance artists Tsedaye Makonnen and Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and designer Maggie Pate.

The artists are creating work in response to 25 prompts that Douglass gave them. “Wherever they eat or however they choose to prepare their food is their gallery, their own museum,” she explains. “The one thing that ties everyone together is that there is something about the act of ‘reclaiming’ in each of their practices, something about how and why they reclaim that pushes their work forward.”

While the National Museum of Women in the Arts has reopened to visitors, it requires timed-entry passes, which limits capacity in accordance with public health guidelines. Visitors must also wear masks and maintain at least six feet of distance from one another. Such safety measures are now common at cultural institutions across the country. (On Thursday, the Smithsonian Institution announced that the museums it had reopened as well as the National Zoo will close indefinitely starting Nov. 23 due to a regional surge in coronavirus cases.)

“Reclamation” is the museum’s first exhibit to take place entirely online. (Should the pandemic reach a point where it’s safe for people to gather again, the museum may develop in-person experiences as well.) The planning started in 2019, before the pandemic hit. When COVID came, Douglass and her team took the opportunity to radically rework the show.

“COVID in a strange way brought a certain openness to our approach, and it forced us to be more experimental,” she explains. “Our future is dependent upon innovation and the energetic correction of the past for a more equitable future.”

The exhibit’s submission form is intended as a response to the pandemic and also the racism in mainstream food media, according to Douglass. She says her team discussed “the personal and historic fault lines or past traumas associated with sharing recipes or food stories in a predominantly white space.”

Some of those divides stem from the severing of food from its origins, particularly when those origins are not in predominantly white, Western countries. In a recent Atlantic article, Hannah Giorgis described this kind of appropriation as “decontextualizing nonwhite food practices from the communities that have birthed them.”

For Douglass and her team, the online submission form provides crucial context, allowing people to directly share their stories and photos alongside recipes. The form asks where in the world people’s recipes originated, and who, if anyone, shared the recipes with them.

“In telling the memory rather than the recipe, people can participate without replicating or echoing past experiences where cultural identity was negated or appropriated,” Douglass says. “Through this pantry we wanted to tell stories that challenge these narratives and complicate our understanding of the history of these ingredients.”

She points to tomatoes as an example. While many people associate tomatoes with Italian cuisine, they are native to Central and South America. (The plant’s original name, tomatl, comes from the Aztec language Nahuatl.) When the Spanish Empire conquered parts of Mesoamerica, Spaniards brought tomatoes back to Europe, and the plants eventually made it to Italy.

Framing food in its personal and historical context is its own form of reclamation, Douglass says. “Reclaiming our food histories is key to reclaiming the cultures that we are part of,” she adds. “I hope that people see themselves in the show and in the museum.”

“Reclamation: Recipes, Remedies, and Rituals” opens on the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ website on Jan. 18, 2021 and runs through Dec. 31, 2021. People can make submissions to the exhibit here.