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As the featured artist at a recent Black Cube event, CU 91���Ҹ�'s Alvin Gregorio emphasized how getting primal and getting to know each other—and yes, sharing meals—makes better people

Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio understands the value of a shared meal. The 91���Ҹ� 91���Ҹ� professor of drawing and painting and associate chair for art practices was the recent featured artist and host of ,��a series of free, artist-led community potluck brunches organized by, a nomadic art museum based in Englewood.

Artists invited to host Talk With Your Mouth Full��select one ingredient for a main dish prepared by a local chef. Participants are encouraged to bring a dish as well, although it is not required, nor must it include the selected ingredient. After food and conversation, the artist leads a simple activity with the aim of fostering discussion.

For Gregorio, the choice of ingredient was simple: “Immediately I thought of ube, which is the purple yam of the Philippines,” he says. “It’s one of the most striking colors in Filipino food.”

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Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio, a CU 91���Ҹ� associate professor of art and art history, was the featured artist at a recent Black Cube Talk With Your Mouth Full potluck event, which featured ube cheese pandesals. (Photo: Alvin Gregorio)

To take on the challenge, Black Cube enlisted the help of, a family-owned Filipino American bakery in Centennial that created ube cheese pandesals: deep purple bread rolls filled with melted cheese and topped with golden breadcrumbs.

The artistry of the pandesals parallels Gregorio’s art, which features vibrant, eye-catching palettes and diverse textures. Through an unrestricted practice transcending any one technique, material or form, Gregorio creates drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures, performance and audio pieces that explore immigration, family, war, spirituality and defense mechanisms.

Sharing meals, lowering your defenses

Talk With Your Mouth Full��addresses an assumption to which Gregorio is particularly adverse: the role of food in the studio and museum space (or lack thereof). Generally, exposing art to food and drink can threaten the quality of the work or destroy it entirely.

Yet Gregorio welcomes food in both the studio and his classroom. “I’m into [the potluck], much in the same way I am in class,” he says. “I want people to eat. As long as you clean up after yourself, I want you to eat in class too, because then you know you’re at home and safe. You’re in a place where you [can] put your guard down.”

In addition to allowing his students to eat in class, Gregorio aims to incorporate shared meals into his teaching practice. “College students aren’t great at feeding themselves,” he says. “Even the best of us get busy, so that’s one of things I want to include in the classroom. If there’s a 12-12:30pm break between all of our classes, then, all right, [every] Wednesday, let’s see everyone. Let’s do a community meal. When you start feeding people, people are like, all right, these people do care about me.”

In the classroom, Gregorio says he’s “trying to do it the right way, you know, where people aren’t being vulnerable [with] people they don’t trust.” Many art classes at the 91���Ҹ� 91���Ҹ�, including Gregorio’s, hinge on portfolio-building and periodic critiques, which are structured opportunities for a student’s peers to evaluate and analyze their work and share feedback, often requiring a degree of vulnerability from the student.

He sees shared meals as a tool to ease the pressure of critiques and to build trust, because “eating with other people is grounding, talking about things you love is grounding… It’s kind of hard [to] keep your guard up when [you have] powdered sugar all over your face.”

Caring for the person–not just the portfolio

As art practitioners rely heavily on critiques to improve, Gregorio insists that the most important aspect of his teaching practice is earning trust from his students by prioritizing their safety and comfort. “That has to be first,” says Gregorio. “If we’re talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, at the bottom there’s safety . . . If people don’t feel safe there (in the classroom), then they can’t get to the top, and the top is generosity and creativity.”

To encourage trust, Gregorio gives social homework, or what he calls “fake homework.” These “fake homework” assignments range from suggestions to hang out with a peer over the weekend to long-term collaborative assignments that occur during class, like starting a “band” with a group of peers, carefully curating a vibe and designing an album cover over the course of a semester. Gregorio also often assigns “docu-buddies,” which are groups of peers responsible for photographing each other’s work in progress throughout the term.

While these simple, unserious social assignments may seem menial, Tyson Tieu, a senior in the Department of Art and Art History and a former student of Gregorio’s who attended Talk With Your Mouth Full, says he misses the social activities. In most studio art classes, Tieu says, “you’re in your own little bubble, like you’re doing your own thing and you’re at your table, whereas with Alvin, it could be annoying, but, yeah, he does force to you to, like, get up and move and work outside your comfort zone… if you’re [having] art block or something, it just helps you get your hand moving.”

Gregorio says, looking back, “It’s always been that first—people. I’m [only] able to get [my students] to trust me when we’re doing really hard things if I earn it along the way. . . . So then, if I say something that I need to say to make the work better, it’s a little bit easier for people to accept, because I earn the trust through caring for the whole person rather than just the portfolio.”

‘Art shifts the vibe’

The same ethos of security and companionship helped Gregorio shape his activity for Talk With Your Mouth Full, for which he was intent on addressing the current moment:��“I didn’t want to do anything so escapist. I wanted [to] acknowledge that [we’re] living through a weird time.”

For his exercise at Talk With Your Mouth Full, Gregorio started by admitting to his audience: “I hate violence, I hate war . . . I hate Donald Trump and all that he stands for . . . One of the things I hate about right now is [that] I’m living in a time where I feel like there’s a lot of hate in the world, and it’s f***ing exhausting.”

To combat this exhaustion, Gregorio reorients his mindset by wishing the person or thing that angers him well. He asked his audience at Talk With Your Mouth Full��to do the same thing, first by offering his own example. “Hi, Donny,” he said to President Trump, “I wish that something great would happen for you today, so that you can have what I have. So that you can feel love in your life that I have. I hope that someone does something for you today.”

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Alvin Gregorio (seated, black cap) leads an art project during a recent Talk With Your Mouth Full event at which he was the featured artist. (Photo: Alvin Gregorio)

For Talk With Your Mouth Full,��he prepared print outs of his own work for participants to collage onto manilla envelopes he’d spray painted and signed, in the hopes that they could make something beautiful and flip difficult things into positive ones, in collaboration with others, during a time of tension and political unrest. “It’s just to try to remind people that art can help change perspective,” says Gregorio.��

Before beginning the art activity, Gregorio explained the significance of the manilla envelopes: to pay for his undergraduate degree, Gregorio worked early mornings as a janitor on his college campus. During his shifts, he plucked used manilla envelopes and other discarded material found in the trash cans of professors and faculty members, a foundation which he transformed into some of the first works he ever sold.

A thread through Gregorio’s work is using art to address difficult things head on and “shift the vibe.”

As the grandson of a Filipino World War II guerrilla sniper, Gregorio spent most of his life hating the soldiers that came to the Philippines and killed his family. Eventually, he says he realized how exhausting that was. “Instead of expelling their ghosts,” Gregorio says, “I want to enlist them. And I think to myself, like, hey, they’re just f***ing teenagers too, [and] their government forced [them] to go to another country and do these things. They're just working-class people, too. So, I started to think, hey, instead of hating the Japanese that came to my village– those soldiers were just like my grandfather. They were sent to do something they couldn’t handle.

“Then I found in my practice that I could truly change my perspective, change my life. I don’t have to hate anymore. I like using art to think of a different way, like, hey, I genuinely want the offspring of those people to [be] happy and safe and peaceful.

‘The best part of my week’

In 2015, Gregorio was diagnosed with, a rare autoimmune neurological disorder affecting the myelin, or protective covering, of peripheral nerves, preventing them from conducting electricity in the way they should.

“Every Friday, Mary [Gregorio’s partner] gets my shots,” Gregorio told his Black Cube audience. “Three [shots], and it lasts three hours. And it’s the worst part of my week, and I’ve been doing it for 10 years.

“I want you all to consider the power we have in reframing the things that we do, and [how] art does that,” Gregorio tells the Black Cube audience. Asking them to hold him accountable, he says, “from here on out, I want you to remind me that [these shots are] the best part of my week. That is the part of my week that helps me be [around] for our continuum… So in front of you all, I’m going to try to change that.”

“I could do the opposite and just talk s*** on everything,” he says, admitting that it would probably be easier. Sharing his mother’s advice, he says, “If you’re not going to do it out of love, don’t do it. And growing up, I was like, are you trying to tell me that I have to be in a good mood about all the things that I have to do? And what I realized is that what I [think] she’s saying now that I look back, is like, if you could figure out how to find the good in it, it’s going to be better for everybody. You’ll enjoy it, the product will be better… that’s art, right? Trying to shift the perspective. Like, hey, you have the ability to shift your perspective… we have the power to reimagine the way we see things.”

At Talk With Your Mouth Full, in his classroom and his day-to-day life, Gregorio says, “I hope to remind people that creativity is an awesome tool. Art is an awesome tool.”

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