Wall of bread: A tasty art form

It's a wonder: 3,960 slices of white bread, from 180 loaves, minus the end pieces but with the crusts. Such is the building material installation artist Beili Liu used in her site-specific work currently on display at Alice Lloyd Hall.

(Photo by Scott Galvin)

"Breadth," a wall of bread stretching 20 feet between pillars and more than three feet high, has become part of the Lloyd Hall dining room and will remain there through the end of September.

Liu says she felt bread would be an appropriate medium for a work in a site used for dining. "Bread, that's a good material," she says. "It's something we all know about."

As for the one-slice thick wall she created, Liu says she wanted to make something architectural. "Maybe you won't see it right away." That seemed to be the case recently when students entering the room thought the piece was cardboard with a computer-generated picture attached to it.

The bread used in the work was dried so it wouldn't mold or attract flying insects. At first Liu toasted the slices, but found that process much too slow. So, during the summer months of her visiting artist role at U-M, she began drying the bread slices on platforms of window screen so air could circulate around them. Once all the slices were dry, Liu began stacking them brick-style in the chosen space. That process took about seven hours.

"I want the work to encourage questions about what you think about food," Liu says. U-M nutritionist Ruth Blackburn responded, "If you have to use white sandwich bread, it's better to use it for art than eat it."

Liu, a native of Jilin, China, is a graduate of the School of Art & Design and currently is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Eastern Michigan University. As a visiting artist for the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program (LHSP), she has been working with the students of Mark Tucker, coordinator of the Arts on the Hill Program and a lecturer in LSHP.

For more information, visit: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lhsp.