Local Artists Jalisa Robinson and Glenna Jennings share work on Food Justice at MOCA Cleveland
Jan 30th - Aug 2

Using the egg as a culture-crossing icon, The Price of Eggs is a photo-based, socially-engaged project that examines food apartheid, redlining, and community-led resistance through the lens of everyday nourishment. Through portrait, still life, and documentary photography alongside wallpaper and furniture design, the artists center their work around Gem City Market, Dayton’s member-owned grocery cooperative founded by grassroots efforts in a former food desert where the
artists are neighbors.

The project began with interviews and photographs of customers and employees at the market before the artists moved to the studio, where they cracked shells, separated yolks, fried, scrambled and froze the eggs that stand in for an ongoing negotiation between bodies and systems, scarcity and abundance, extraction and cultivation. With materials gathered at Irby’s Old School Farm in Trotwood and frames forged from wood reclaimed in the 2019 Dayton tornado, the work itself is
embedded with regional histories of loss, resilience, and renewal.

Robinson and Jennings met over a decade ago at the University of Dayton in an art course on food justice, and both have remained active in the city's struggle for food access ever since: Jennings as a professor of photography and social practice and Robinson as a worker-owner and current board member at GCM. While their ages, identities, and lived experiences differ, their shared practice is grounded in reciprocity, trust, and long-term commitment to place. For both artists,
The Price of Eggs reflects a sustained and ongoing relationship with a community they call home.

The Price of Eggs debuted at Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in May 2025 as part of Ohio Now: State of Nature, va group exhibition co-organized by CAC and MOCA Cleveland, and curated by Theresa Bembnister, DJ Hellerman, Megan Lykins Reich, and Christina Vassallo. Presented among an award-winning array of fellow artists, The Price of Eggs extends Dayton-rooted stories into a broader ecological and social framework, asking how systems of housing, labor, and access
shape what—and who—gets to be nourished.