Artists frame history as a living thing, and the show is better for it. Across from Mitchell’s introductory text, Richey has created an archive around The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, a June 1988 art installation designed and consumed for the city’s 350th birthday celebrations on the New Haven Green. At the time, Richey was a member of the then-fledgling Arts Council of Greater New Haven and a working artist herself. Biagio DiLieto was serving what would be his last term as mayor. Festival coordinator and artist Robert Gregson commissioned Richey for the piece.
To complete the project, she worked with a team of 50 artists-turned-“cake commissioners,” as well as members of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, the New Haven Register, and Leon Weinberg of the now-defunct Leon’s Bakery to build a large, scalable iced replica of City Hall and provide enough sheet cake to feed 3,500 city residents. True to the installation’s name—and its attempt to mirror city policy—residents had to make it through a maze to receive a piece of cake, for which they received a permit for consumption. Even the building and its iced replica resonated: Henry Austin built New Haven’s gingerbread house of a City Hall in 1861, exactly 100 years before Who Governs? was published and 127 years before the city's birthday.
Amidst parades, horse-drawn carriage rides, live music and dancing on the Green in 1988, cake commissioners and celebrity guests doled out sweet slices with permits to consume cake. They used rubber stamps for fork usage and appropriate cake zoning. Richey’s aim was not just celebratory: she also intended to remind DiLieto and the city’s Board of Alders (then dubbed the Board of Aldermen) that there was an acute need for affordable artists' housing across the city. It’s a need that still exists—and is perhaps exacerbated by New Haven’s number of luxury apartments—today.
In the gallery, Richey has assembled a small display that walks viewers through the installation, with photographs, preserved rubber stamps, old programs and a screen-printed shirt from the event. It’s a window into history that is both cheeky and instructive: the things Richey was asking for in 1988 are still things artists are asking for today. The only difference is that New Haven is 32 years and four mayoral administrations older than it was then.
When a viewer sees a faded yellow “permit to eat cake,” they may be reminded of the long, confusion-riddled showdown between artists and alders over who got to live in the Hamilton Street Clock Factory last year. Or, perhaps, the narrow-eyed befuddlement that often strikes first-time presenters to the city’s Historic District Commission, when a ten-minute request is met with four hours of debate. Or the Board of Alders' struggle to balance the city budget each year when 60 percent of the city’s grand list is tax exempt.
"The bureaucracy involved frightens, inspires and fascinates me," Richey told the New Haven Register in June 1988. "But through it all I've discovered that systems, hierarchy, aren't necessarily bad, that in certain cases they are essential to get things done. It's been quite a stretch for me working with so many individuals and groups."
