Fruit and Babies
Brooks Frederick
April 3 – August 6, 2011 This series of paintings is inspired by the rich food culture of New Orleans and south Louisiana where I grew up. The plastic babies I depict are known as ‘King Cake Babies.’ They are placed inside King Cakes, a cinnamon filled pastry-like cake eaten during Mardi Gras season. Tradition has it that whoever gets the baby throws the next party. Growing up, we kids made a game of finding the baby in the cake. In this body of work, I am reinvestigating my interest in King Cake Babies, fruit and hot sauce for new purposes: visual one liners, a starting point for a dialogue about human subjects like race relations and intimacy. You can see a larger variety of my work at www.brooksfrederick.com