The Think Potato Institute (TPI) is an interdisciplinary archive, educational platform, research center, and cultural institution founded by Jeffrey Allen Price. Through exhibitions, collections, research, lectures, workshops, publications, festivals, and creative projects, TPI explores the cultural life of the potato across art, history, agriculture, folklore, media, and everyday life.
Operating simultaneously as archive, research initiative, curatorial framework, and evolving social sculpture, the Institute investigates how a single ordinary object can connect seemingly unrelated aspects of human experience. Rather than treating the potato solely as a food crop, TPI examines its role as a cultural symbol, artistic subject, historical actor, and source of collective imagination.
At the center of the Institute is POTATOISM, a long-duration interdisciplinary investigation into the potato’s recurring presence throughout visual culture, popular media, ritual traditions, conceptual art, cinema, music, education, and public life. Through this framework, TPI seeks to document, preserve, interpret, and expand the cultural narratives surrounding one of humanity’s most familiar yet overlooked objects.
The Institute serves as a platform for the emerging field of Potato Humanities, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue across art, history, agriculture, culture, education, and community engagement. By bringing together research, collecting, exhibitions, public programming, and creative practice, TPI proposes that ordinary objects possess extraordinary cultural depth.
Though TPI currently exists through its collection, archive, exhibitions, educational activities, and artistic projects, the long-term vision of TPI includes the development of a permanent center dedicated to potato-related art, research, collections, film, performance, education, and public programming.
Through the study of the potato, the Think Potato Institute encourages broader reflection on creativity, resilience, interconnectedness, history, and the symbolic systems through which human societies understand themselves.