Red Flower Collective, founded in 2021, is an iterative artist’s project based in New York City. The collective treats the kitchen as an open studio and a lab, studying both alchemical processes of cooking and the aesthetics of cultural production. Their work plays with form, going beyond a food-based practice to also incorporate installation, performance, and printed matter.
The collective aims to uplift and acknowledge often devalued reproductive labors of the kitchen. Participants exhibit familial histories and domestic inheritances through the sensory and the archival. With an emphasis on care and communal eating, they challenge notions of fetishization, transaction, and consumption as related to ecosystems of food service and its associated practices.
Red Flower Collective is decentralized from a singular, physical space. The collective has often prepared and hosted meals in apartment homes, opening up domestic spaces typically defined by their privacy and instead inviting in a public and community use. Their recent collaborations with institutions and residencies include: Chautauqua School of Art (2021), Asia Art Archive in America (2022), Flux Factory (2022), Hurford Center of the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College (2022), CUE Art Foundation (2023), Letra Muerta (2023), Mildred’s Lane (2023, 2024), Fire Island Residency (2024), and the New Art Dealers Alliance (2024).
Current Members
Erin Montanez
Historian and archivist, who co-founded Red Flower Collective with Tsohil Bhatia after many shared meals, kitchen lessons, and spirited arguments. She has always enjoyed the elaborate, celebratory energies of hosting. Teaching herself how to cook was a natural continuation of this pleasure. She brings to the collective her skills as a researcher, providing historical and contemporary references that shape the project’s ethos and its place in the cultural ecosystem of NYC. She is also: a human ladder; time keeper; notetaker; and maker of pastas, cakes, and breads.
It’s the only thing I want to be thinking about. I want to think about cooking for myself, for my friends; everything happens in the kitchen for me. It’s a place where people bring stories, fictions, long histories, complicated histories. It feels like the best place to think about all those things. I love eating. I don’t want to be doing anything else. I’m relieved to have found friends who feel the same way.
Tsohil Bhatia
Tsohil Bhatia (@tsohilbhatia) is an artist and homemaker and co-founded Red Flower Collective with Erin Montanez. They’ve cooked for themself and their community for a dozen years and owe their knowledge of kitchen processes to the women in their family, YouTube videos, years of recipe testing and innumerable failures. Their mission for Red Flower Collective is to offer the most affordable meal in NYC. Being in the collective from its very beginning, Tsohil has contributed to the project in the logistical, administrative, creative and conceptual capacities and they’re insistent on bringing impeccable food on the table.
I believe in food for pleasure and I love making food that is laborious. It is through this labor and the desire for pleasure that something like rice has become hundreds of things. It is evidence that food is not just sustenance, but we care about what things taste like, and what they do to the body. The desire for pleasure and the need for nutrition can enable a simple ingredient to become something spectacular.
Jenna Hamed
Queens-based artist & art worker. She joined the collective in Spring 2022 after serving as the guest cook for Meal #6: Palestinian Soul. In addition to introducing Levantine cooking styles into the collective, she documents the spontaneous moments leading up to & during meals; and has implemented much of the collective’s internal administrative and operational practices
[Cooking and eating] food is my ultimate source of inspiration. It goes hand in hand with a lot of art forms that I’m involved with: photography, bookmaking, printmaking. When we build menus, there’s this practice of sequencing dishes; and I channel that same rhythm and flow in my everyday life. Food is a major part of connecting with myself, my loved ones, my ancestors; a lot of the time when I’m in the kitchen, I feel like I’m tuning into the energy, the knowledge of my ancestors. I become a vessel for that knowledge as it pours through me and comes out of my hands. Cooking makes me extend beyond my present and individualized self when I’m able to tap into deeply rooted knowledges; when I’m able to feed people; whether it’s with 1 person, or 10, 20, or 50 people. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. And at one point in my life, it felt like the only thing that made sense to me. And that’s why I joined RFC.
Bang Tran
Bang Tran joined the collective Spring 2024 after attending consecutive meals and collaborating with RFC for meal #11. Their cooking inspiration stems from their childhood in Hanoi and all the places that they have travelled to. Their favorite food is noodle soup of any kind, whether phở, ramen, or udon. Bang brings to the collective their ideas in the menu creation process and their kitchen experience.