On Saturday, July 28th from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, join Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book signing and conversation with artist Simone Shubuck. The discussion – about her new book, her ‘Wifey‘ project, and the relationship between art and food – will be moderated by curator Laura Fried and will include Wifey collaborator and James Beard-nominated pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz*. *And, yes, there will be cake. And Yola Mezcal.

In the summer of 2017, Simone Shubuck launched Wifey, a Brooklyn pop-up that fused art, food, ceramics, flowers, and bit of retail in an elevated DIY way. During the process, Shubuck realized that so much of what she was doing directly connected to a show she staged as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s. Wanting to formalize that multi-decade connection, she decided to make a book.

While at the Art institute, Shubuck studied painting, but probably spent more time tagging on the streets in the middle of the night than in her studio. When it came time to produce her student show, she constructed 10 cakes festooned with pink ham hocks, a school of fresh sardines, a tent of chicken feet, and live crickets within a hat box within a cake. It was these images that attracted chefs Ignacio Mattos and Natasha Pickowicz – both of New York’s Estela, Flora Bar, and Cafe Altro Paradiso – to the project. They became partners and began experimenting with dreamy layer cakes which were served at Wifey to great acclaim.

As described by Ella Riley-Adams on Vogue.com: “She had made a paged project before; a short run of zines for Natasha Pickowicz’s bake sale benefit at Altro Paradiso. ‘It had more of a punk vibe,’ Shubuck says—150 copies, printed in Chinatown. The new book feels more like a collector’s item: a retrospective of off-kilter cakes, blossoming drawings, and character-filled ceramics that charts Shubuck’s creative course. (It’s the ideal gift for the cool girl in your life.) As Alex Wagner writes, next to a bright yellow page in the book: ‘Simone’s work—on paper, in clay, in life!—retains a glorious sense of mess and possibility and freedom.’ Click here to read more about Ms. Shubuck’s book and its New York launch on Vogue.com.