Founder & Director, Think Potato Institute
Jeffrey Allen Price is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, archivist, and writer whose work explores the cultural, symbolic, historical, and artistic life of the potato. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, collecting, and research, he has spent more than three decades investigating the potato as both material object and cultural form.
Price is the founder and director of the Think Potato Institute (TPI) and the originator of POTATOISM, a conceptual framework that examines the potato as a global cultural signifier through which broader questions of history, labor, identity, creativity, mythology, and collective memory may be explored. Through this ongoing body of work, he has developed exhibitions, lectures, workshops, performances, festivals, publications, collections, and research projects dedicated to expanding public understanding of the potato’s place within art and culture.
Photo courtesy of Carrie Anne Gonzalez.
Internationally recognized for his potato-centered practice, Price has presented his work and research at conferences, museums, galleries, universities, and cultural institutions throughout the United States and abroad. His presentations have included the World Potato Congress in Cusco, Peru; keynote lectures at the Scientex Conference on Nutrition and Food Science in Dubai, UAE; and the United By Potato Power conference in Cēsis, Latvia.
His work has been exhibited at institutions including the National Museum in Kielce, Poland; the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, Tennessee; the Islip Art Museum in New York; and the PLMC Global Center for Latvian Art in Cēsis, Latvia. His projects and research have been featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Atlas Obscura, PBS, the Food Network, and numerous other publications and media outlets.
Photo courtesy of Juan López Espantaleón.
Through the Think Potato Institute, Price maintains a collection of more than 6,000 potato-related artifacts and an extensive archive of POTATOPHENA—documented potato-related references, stories, jokes, idioms, recordings, screenshots, oral traditions, and other cultural traces collected through research and everyday experience. Together, these collections support the emerging fields of POTATOISM and Potato Humanities.
In addition to his work as an artist, curator, collector, and lecturer, Price has spent more than three decades growing potatoes in home gardens, educational programs, community projects, and exhibition-based agricultural installations.
Photo courtesy of Matthew Neil Gehring.
Price received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Missouri State University in 1999 and a Master of Fine Arts from Stony Brook University in 2003. He lives and works on Long Island, New York, where he teaches art and continues his research, collecting, writing, and curatorial activities.
Living POTATOISM
→ 30+ Years of Making Potato Art