Karla Diaz

Karla Diaz is an American performance artist who collects recipes from prison inmates and recreates them in performance using only ingredients and utensils available to those incarcerated. Her multi-media participatory performance Prison Gourmet comments on system-impacted communities and people, the politics of food and questions about institutional power. She has been exhibited in the UK and at multiple museums in the US. She teaches at California State University Long Beach.

Diaz was born in Los Angeles.^[1] She grew up there and in Mexico.^[1] She received a Master's in Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts in 2004.^[1]

Diaz first became aware of such recipes after a mentor, poet Manazar Gamboa, who had spent 17 years in state prisons, shared the "special recipe" for his favorite dish.^[2] Diaz recollected that the recipe, an imitation of tuna casserole, included tuna, mayonnaise, hot sauce, pickle juice, and was topped with crumbled crackers.^[2] She later described it as not tasting very good.^[2]

Diaz collects recipes from prison inmates and recreates them in performance using only ingredients and utensils available to those incarcerated.^[2] Her multi-media participatory performance Prison Gourmet focuses on the food prisoners make for themselves as a supplement to that served to them by the institution.^[2][1][3] It comments on system-impacted communities and people, the politics of food and questions about institutional power.^[2][4][1] It comments on system-impacted communities and people, the politics of food, and questions about institutional power.^[2][4][1]

In 2010 Diaz's brother was incarcerated, and she learned that the prison commissary offered a limited selection of shelf-stable foods such as dry snacks such as chips or corn puffs and instant noodles.^[2] She recalled the dish Gamboa had prepared and began writing to inmates and former inmates in California, asking for their recipes.^[2][5] As of 2015 she had received 200 recipes.^[2] Some of the recipe instructions are very detailed, calling for specific equipment such as a 6" square paper box, a 12.5 ounce cereal bag with no holes, or commonly jury-rigged prison cooking devices such as a stinger.^[2] Some call for specific techniques such as putting ingredients and hot water into a plastic bag, tying the bag off, wrapping it in a towel to retain the heat, and allowing it to sit for a half hour to cook the ingredients.^[2] Recipes she has collected include imitations of traditional Mexican soups.^[6] The most common recipe she receives are for spreads, which usually involve topping instant noodles with dry snacks and/or other ingredients.^[2]

In 2010 Diaz created a 2-hour performance piece, Prison Gourmet, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's EATLACMA event in which she demonstrated the preparation of an imitation of orange chicken, a recipe calling for pork rinds coated in a mixture of strawberry jelly and Kool Aid.^[2] Since then she has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Newcomb Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Serpentine, the Museo Cervantez, Pitzer College, MOCA, and ESMoA.^[7][4][8][1]

According to Diaz, prison food recipes are less about the dishes' taste and more about "a reminder of humanity, community, and the person you were on the outside".^[2] The inmate from whom she'd received the orange chicken recipe told her that although the finished dish was a poor imitation of the original, making and eating it reminded him of the times he'd made and eaten real orange chicken with his daughter and of time spent with her.^[2][3]

Diaz is on the faculty at California State University Long Beach.^[1]

Diaz has received an Art Matters award and a Los Angeles Arts Recognition award.^[1]