Situated in the Hudson Valley, the Edenic 120-acre grounds of Art Omi supply a rich terrain for land art of varying (though often massive) scales. Artist quori theodor made full use of the environment in their new work Familiars, a spiritual pilgrimage/feast that offered its participants a new way of engaging with celebration and communion. theodor, a conceptual artist exploring the topic of food, developed Familiars as a means of resisting colonial ideologies that congeal around the generational ritualisation of consumption. Guiding a procession on horseback through forests and fields, theodor invited their followers to partake in a mobile banquet of 13th-century-inspired cuisine, including salted alfalfa ice blocks, gold-painted apples, and tamarind jam.

Familiars was commissioned by Art Omi as part of their current exhibition devoted to the influential American artist Nayland Blake, putting Blake’s legacy in conversation with that of a younger cohort, including the writer hannah baer and photographer Sam Penn. Elsewhere at Art Omi, smaller pavilions designed by collectors and artists in collaboration with architects of their choosing (such as Alice Aycock x JAHN or artist couple Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuku Naito x unit a and Freie Architekten BDA) allow each participant to preserve and display their work precisely on their own terms, inspired by museums such as Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. While still under construction, the pavilions will officially open to the public in Spring 2027.

Amber Later: I was interested in how you made your work an offering of an alternate feast holiday to the fourth of July. From your perspective, what are the values or ideals that a feast holiday ought to fortify within a community?
quori theodor: Yes, July 3rd 2026, just off the mark of the 250th anniversary of this colonial project. I like this kind of slant rhyme of historical anachronism, where all holidays collide, and in doing so, a surrealist alternative emerges. In terms of values, a holiday claims the worth of lived experience through the effort of meeting up, serving food, marking time with, and self-defining family. 

A lot of my work is drawing attention to how traditions, ritual, and a sense of normalcy get canonised through food, and also how quickly these things get congealed generationally. For example, a particular food fad or government dietary intervention might only have happened a generation prior, but the next generation has the impression that this is how it’s always been done, especially at the dinner table. Familiars then asks: why this food? Why these people? Why this day? Who are we celebrating? And importantly, what values do we want to continue to celebrate? It’s an open-ended question meant for others, but for me, in terms of a cohort, it’s about celebrating the very people who offered their creativity to the roots of the best kind of celebrations and feast holidays: witches, trans people, artists, and freaks.

“It’s about celebrating the very people who offered their creativity to the roots of the best kind of celebrations and feast holidays: witches, trans people, artists, and freaks.”

AL: How do you see your piece as being in conversation with the work/prompts offered by Nayland Blake?
QT: I’d say directly through gingerbread. When I started this project Sara [O’Keeffe] rattled off a bunch of connections I already have with Nayland Blake’s work, beyond our obvious shared interest in BDSM. The piece that struck me the most was Blake covering the walls of their childhood apartment, where their mother still lived, in gingerbread. It was so poetic and whimsical and heart-wrenching and absurd, totally up my alley. So I paid homage to that in the last station of the spiritual pilgrimage of Familiars – a dollhouse temple with Doric wedding-cake columns and cobblestone-sized slabs of gingerbread. In the Greco-Roman period, travellers seeking aid from the gods for physical ailments would make in ceramic or marble the body part they were praying for (erectile dysfunction was a common one, lots of single penises are in archaeological collections, or locks of hair for hair loss, an arthritic shoulder, and so forth). Therefore, the final station had a bunch of marzipan anatomical body parts on the columns. The marzipan and gingerbread, classic Christmas treats, were all served in Omi’s abandoned Christmas tree forest. 

AL: Which ingredient were you most excited to cook with for Familiars and why?
QT: I think grains of paradise, because it was so incredibly popular in the 1800s in the US and is almost unheard of here today, and not by chance. Grains of Paradise were often used to cover the taste of illegal alcohols in the 19th C. Instead of trying to ban the backyard production of alcohol, the government decided to ban Grains of Paradise (except, of course, in the institutionalised version of Bombay Gin). It’s interesting to see other spices like cinnamon (in its indigeneity, deeply not a product of the Americas) claim this classic American place in pies and so on, while some like Grains of Paradise, an equally dynamic flavour, fall from favour. Grains of Paradise folds in conversation of food fads, government intervention in food systems, and food culture. The migration of the travelling group in this work pays homage to the global transience of food, grounding the violence of something like the spice trade in the intimate, more relational aspects of its history.

AL: How were you inspired by the physical environment of the Art Omi grounds? Was there anything particular about how the procession/feast interacted with the environment that surprised or delighted you?
QT: The abandoned Christmas tree farm is, of course, a very unique opportunity, especially given the nature of this work, as a proposition for a new feast holiday. I love that a couple of people who arrived late followed the horse’s hoofprints to join the group. The dappled light in the woods can’t be recreated in lighting design. 

AL: With a very site and sensory-specific piece such as this, what resonance do you hope it carries forth beyond the day it happened?
QT: Just one of possibility. That we have agency about how we adapt our traditions with our kin and food. That we don’t have to continue celebrating holidays that are grounded in colonial exploitation, and that certainly doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate together and feast! That animals have their own political subjectivity. That magic is a choice.  On a more practical note, I hope to bring the remnant sculptures – the custom suit I wore, the video and photo documentation, the salt lick posts – together as a future show in a more urban context, again with horses. 

AL: Are there any details of your outfit with a particular historical or symbolic significance you’d like to highlight?
QT: The custom suit is designed by Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen out of my old linen protest signage that hung outside my fire escape for six years. The hat is a folded dinner napkin, and the chaps were a leather adaptation of stand-alone pant legs that Zoe had made for her last show. We were both inspired by a jacket we had seen at the Mother Daughter Holy Spirit sale, which was a one-of-a-kind patchwork jacket hand-made by Jean Paul Gaultier for a small theatre production of Peter Pan. I think it was important to lean into the gesture of a trans Prince Charming on horseback. The outfit definitely delivers in that regard, with the smocked collar and archival materials.