J.A.P. Backyard and Potato Garden • Springfield, Missouri • 1996
The First Annual Think Potato Festival marked the earliest public manifestation of ideas that would later develop into POTATOISM and the Think Potato Institute. Organized by Jeffrey Allen Price in the backyard of his Springfield, Missouri home, the event began as an experiment in participation, humor, social sculpture, and community building.
Friends and fellow artists were invited to contribute something potato-related—a dish, joke, song, costume, artwork, story, or performance. The guiding premise was simple: everyone already possessed a one-to-one relationship with the potato. Unlike many artistic subjects that require specialized knowledge or training, the potato was universally familiar and accessible, creating a shared point of entry for creative participation.
The festival combined elements of potluck dinner, performance event, and artistic gathering. One memorable recurring action involved artist Chad Woody diving onto a pile of baked potatoes placed on the hood of his car, which was parked near the potato garden. Looking back, the event functioned as a playful form of social sculpture, shaped equally by food, conversation, performance, humor, and collective participation.
Although modest in scale, many of the ideas that would later become central to the Think Potato Institute were already present: accessibility, participation, collecting, storytelling, community engagement, vegetarian values, and the use of humor as a vehicle for cultural inquiry. The accompanying 22-page zine, Potato Tome, documented early interests in potato history, folklore, language, art, foodways, and cultural symbolism that would later evolve into the field of Potato Humanities. Price later described the event as a “Tata” event—a potato-centered counterpart to a Dada happening—reflecting both its absurdity and its underlying conceptual ambitions.
Today, the First Annual Think Potato Festival stands as one of the earliest identifiable landmarks in the development of POTATOISM and the institutional history of the Think Potato Institute.