The Surreal Times Dinner Project

Surreal Times Dinner Project 

A Participatory Arts Event 

Hosted by Tonya Lemos 

November 4, 2025 

6-8pm 

Venue: A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St, Northampton, MA 01060 

Contact: Tony(a) Lemos herbaltonya@gmail.com www.tonyalemosarts.com 

Surreal Times Dinner Project comes to the A.P.E. Gallery on Main Street in November. This participatory art event is organized and hosted by artist and herbalist Tonya Lemos. Blurring the line between performance, ritual, and shared meal, this dinner invites participants into a world where conversation, creativity, and food interweave in unexpected ways. 

The Surreal Times Dinner Project transforms the act of dining into a collective artwork, drawing inspiration from surrealist games, relational aesthetics, and the practice of gathering as art. Guests become both collaborators and audience, contributing to an atmosphere of curiosity, experimentation, and conviviality. 

This project continues Lemos’s ongoing exploration of art as social practice—where connection, imagination, and shared experience take precedence over permanence. 

In keeping with the spirit of chance and surrealist play, participants will be selected at random from submitted applications and notified by October 20, 2025. 

FILL OUT FORM TO ATTEND: HERE

Each participant will be asked to bring a dish that is special to them, inspired by a woman in their lives. These offerings—personal, ancestral, or imaginative—will become part of the evening’s collaborative table, weaving together nourishment, memory, and story. 

Artist Statement: The Surreal Times Dinner Project

The Surreal Times Dinner Project is an ongoing, process-based artwork that transforms the act of sharing a meal into a ritual of resistance, intimacy, and imagination. Each Tuesday evening since January 21, 2025, I have welcomed two guests to a table set in my cabin or out of doors. Together, we eat, talk, and create—our conversations circling themes of hope, gardens, action, and the quiet return of green.

The project is at once dinner, performance, archive, and installation. It gathers fragments of beauty and rupture—moments of laughter, vulnerability, and imagination—and weaves them into a collective oral history of this fractured time. The table becomes altar, stage, and portal; the meal becomes a spell; the gathering becomes a meditation on presence and perception.

Rooted in my background as an artist, ecologist, and herbalist, the project extends my commitment to process-based, ecologically grounded art that fosters reciprocity, sensory awareness, and community care. Drawing inspiration from the Surrealist practice of collaboration and play, as well as from the sisterhood of artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna, these dinners embody the surreal as a way of living: finding magic in the everyday, subversion in the absurd, and connection in uncertain times.

Ultimately, the Surreal Times Dinner Project asks: How do we come together when the world feels unmoored? What new stories might emerge when we gather in ritual, in creativity, in communion? Around this table, we practice remembering—and reimagining—the abundant futures still possible.

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Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd. (A.P.E.) is an artist-led, artist-centered 501(c)3 non-profit organization supporting contemporary artists working in all disciplines by stewarding the spaces in which they create, perform and exhibit their work. A.P.E is dedicated to fostering relationships, encounters, and exchanges that nourish the capacity for imagination.

apearts.org || 413.586.5553 

A.P.E.’s work is made possible in part through ongoing support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts’ Valley Creates program.