Sacramento seniors will get a piece of art with their meals this week through Great Plates Delivered

For the past seven months, more than 1,000 seniors in the City of Sacramento have been receiving three restaurant-cooked meals for free each day through the City’s Great Plates Delivered program.

This week, they will get something extra – a piece of food-themed artwork created by one of seven Sacramento artists participating in an initiative called “Art for the Heart” that is designed to boost the morale of recipients while creating connections to artists and young people in the community.

“This adds a little something extra to the wonderful work of Great Plates Delivered,” said Julius Austin, coordinator of Sacramento’s Promise Zone, one of the partners in the program.

Art for the Heart is funded with $10,000 from the City Office of Arts and Culture. It will be delivered on Wednesday along with holiday gifts purchased by the Riding for Tidings campaign, an effort organized by Paratransit Inc., which delivers meals to the seniors enrolled in Great Plates.

Great Plates Delivered, which has been spearheaded by Mayor Darrell Steinberg and his staff, has delivered a triple benefit during the pandemic, feeding seniors while keeping more than 40 restaurants afloat and providing a market for farmers who usually supply Sacramento’s booming restaurant scene. The cost to the City has been minimal since FEMA reimbursed 75 percent and the state has picked up another 19 pecent.

Great Plates had injected more than $11.2 million into the Sacramento economy as of Dec. 18 at a time when it has been sorely needed. It has delivered nearly 476,000 meals to seniors and currently helps support 42 restaurants.

“Our Great Plates program, which has become a model for the nation, has delivered a triple benefit to our city during the pandemic,” said Mayor Steinberg. “Every day, we feed seniors, keep restaurant kitchens busy, and provide a market for fresh produce from our local farmers.”

Adding art to the food deliveries this week “will provide an opportunity to uplift people’s spirits and positively impact people’s mental health during the pandemic,” Austin said. “We know that seniors are experiencing isolation more than others. Having the contact of an artist who is thinking of them is going to decrease that isolation.”

Each Great Plates recipient will receive one of seven different pieces of art, printed on paper and mounted on a backing board and encased in a plastic sleeve. The art will be tucked into their meal box along with a biography of the artist and a postcard inviting the recipient to respond.

The works explore the connections between people and food. They were created by Northern California artists Luis Campos Garcia, Peter Foucault, and Aida Lizalde. Four printmaking students from Sacramento State also produced pieces.

Sacramento teenagers had considerable input in the creative process. Lizalde held virtual workshops with teens through the Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum, and Garcia did the same through the Sol Collective.

“Aida met with her group several times and the teens sent her drawings of their favorite foods,” said Kelly Lindner, Art Galleries and Collections Curator at Sacramento State. The resulting artwork, she said, is “very diverse as a representation of our community and the types of foods we eat.”

The idea for Art for the Heart grew out of “Hello Stranger,” a project Lindner did last summer at Sacramento State. Eighteen Northern California artists were invited to create works that would be sent out to strangers who signed up via email.

“The project was incredibly successful,” Lindner said. “I had many more requests for people to receive artwork than I had artwork. Pieces went as far away as Canada and Ohio and Massachusetts.”

Austin had the idea of delivering artwork via Great Plates rather than through the mail, and he connected Lindner with Stacey Shelnut-Hendrick at the Crocker Art Museum, and with staff at the City of Sacramento who had access to federal stimulus funds. Both became partners in the effort.

As coordinator of Sacramento’s Promise Zone, Austin’s job is to look out for the 22 square miles of the city that suffer from high levels of poverty, unemployment and low levels of educational attainment. He works to bring in more resources and generally improve the quality of life.

When Lindner told him about the Hello Stranger project, he said he loved the idea of bringing something similar to Sacramento seniors.

“Our job is to increase positive outcomes for those who work, live and play in the Promise Zone,” Austin said. “Sacramento State has been a great partner. We engage with them all the time.”

Lindner said the main goal of Art for the Heart is to “really remember what our community can do for each other when we collaborate.”

“It also reminds teens that there are other people in our community that need attention,” she said.