Atelier Etta launched in February of this year, just before the world tipped over. As founders, we purposefully avoided focusing attention on ourselves as individuals. Choosing to instead create a persona around Etta herself, we wanted to allow our personalities to blend and take Etta places we wouldn’t go solo. This means we hadn’t yet had the time to introduce our full selves and further contextualize Etta’s vision before constantly revising and adapting to an ever changing landscape professionally and personally, collectively and individually.
Etta was co-founded by a Black Queer chef/writer/designer who moved to Canada from the U.S. for two reasons that have come to inescapable relevance of late: to access universal healthcare, and to escape the racial tension and violence that the world has watched play out over the past weeks. The news of the past month hit us HARD. We are passionate about the visual space we are creating in the food world, but there was no way we could post ethereal cocktail photos while kids, literal children, were out fighting police in the streets across dozens of cities. We did not want to add to the cringey stream of unity images and black squares and glib platitudes. So, we decided to give Etta some time and space away from social media to sit with our reactions - we are both Cancers after all - and evaluate the best path for Etta to support the movement.
We are now ready to guide Etta’s work in a manner more directly influenced by our desire to see a true change in this industry, in this country, and around the world for BIPOC communities. We will be sharing these new projects over the coming weeks, as well as resuming our regular programming of food-focused art and letters. In the meantime, stay open to what this time is teaching us all. Eat well and riot on.
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