Flavor-Tripping
with Astria Suparak and Matthew Villar Miranda
Saturday, April 11, 2026 | 2:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
This program will take place off site. We'll depart as a group from the SFAC Main Gallery at 2:15pm
Part science experiment, part biting colonial critique, this interactive program with Dream Jungle artist Astria Suparak and curator Matthew Villar Miranda invites you to taste your way through the tangled, juicy histories of flavor and power.
Sample tropical fruits that have long moved through colonial trade routes yet remain unfamiliar to many American palates. Then experience the West African “miracle berry,” a fruit that makes sour foods taste sweet, flipping acidity into pleasure. Along the way, you’ll explore your “Super Taster” abilities and chew through deeper questions of how and who gets to name, normalize, and exoticize taste.
About the artists
Astria Suparak’s multidisciplinary practice addresses how institutionalized racism, classism, and colonialism are embedded in popular culture, such as in science-fiction movies, rock music, memes, and sports. Using creative and scholarly modes, Suparak’s projects chronicle subcultures and omitted perspectives. Suparak’s Tropicsss series proposes possible, expanded affinities and solidarities across geographies and national borders. Suparak’s installations, videos, and performances have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. A recipient of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award, she lives and works in Oakland, California.
Matthew Villar Miranda is an independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their area of research includes queer relations, Indigenous knowledge systems, and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics, especially within the Austronesian Pacific and its diaspora. Previously at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, they curated solo exhibitions by artists Stephanie Syjuco and Sky Hopinka. As a Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they contributed to exhibitions by Paul Chan, Pao Houa Her, and Pacita Abad. In 2021, as a Los Angeles County Museum of Art–Arizona State University fellow, they co-curated Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum, supported by the Art for Justice Fund. Miranda serves on the Board of Stakeholders for Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative comprised of a cross-institutional coalition dedicated to advancing equity within art museums.
