This artist will live at the Grand Canyon while researching her Arizona roots and food history

LAUREN GILGER: Each year, the Grand Canyon Conservancy welcomes a host of artists, scholars and scientists from across the world to its residency program.

The idea is to give them a chance to practice their work in this culturally rich place — and engage with visitors to the park at the same time.

And the next artist to head West as a part of it is Alessandra Vertrees, a multidisciplinary artist, software engineer and food storyteller who will be tracking her maternal family heritage in nearby Williams during her time at the Grand Canyon.

She plans to do genealogical research, gather stories and explore the local ingredients of the region that connect it all together. I spoke with her more about it — and how far her family goes back in Williams.

Full conversation

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: My grandmother was born there, and her mom was born there, and my great-grandparents met in Williams. My great-grandfather is from Sinaloa, and then my second great-grandmother onward, they were born in New Mexico.

So, the roots in Williams are really short, but there’s a lot of family that was close to my grandmother and extended family buried in Williams, including my grandmother herself. So, my first time in Williams was when we buried my abuela.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. And you grew up far from that, right? In kind of upstate New York and on a farm. So, it sounds like you you had a very interesting upbringing, but one that was sort of disconnected from these roots.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, exactly. Even extended family members like my abuela’s siblings did not know until the funeral. So very, very disconnected from not just the land they’re connected to, but the people within my family as well.

LAUREN GILGER: What did you think about that? Like, it sounds like you’ve been grappling with that sort of disconnect as you’ve been looking into this and trying to trace the the roots of your family.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, it’s been a huge void, and it was one that I, during COVID, was just that was my hobby was like trying to get closer to my family as close as I could on the computer with all the research and kind of get to know these people. And then eventually, I was just like, "I want to meet these people and like talk to them on the phone."

But there’s a lot of trauma on that side of the family. They weren’t that close to my grandmother. So, we really couldn’t get close until she passed, unfortunately, but it’s been really beautiful ever since. Now that we’re all connected, I was just in Mexico with my great-aunt and her husband, and we got to really, really bond and get to know each other, and that was a really beautiful trip.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s amazing. So, I mean, did you learn something about your family, about the culture that you’ve been sort of disconnected from?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, I learned a lot. They grew up pretty rough in the beginning, so there’s also this disconnect in my experience, not just growing up on a farm in New York, but like this kind of class experience that I’m not familiar with that I’ve also been trying to learn about, but just trying to really get an idea of what life was like for my family.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s talk about how food comes into this for you, because this is part of your practice, it sounds like, like food storytelling, I guess, for lack of a better phrase.

Where do these two kind of cross for you? This genealogical tracing of your roots and your family’s history and the food connected to that?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think the connection became really clear when I started jotting down recipes on my own after my grandmother died, and then I realized that a lot of things reminded me of her. And that, even though she was thousands of miles away in Los Angeles at the end of her life, our relationship was mostly on the phone, and we would always talk about what we were cooking. And when she would come and visit, or when we would visit her, we were always in the kitchen together.

So, a lot of my memories of learning how to cook are with my mom and with her mom. So, there was a lot of stuff tied to that that I was like, "That’s actually really beautiful, and I’d like to explore that more." But before that, I was kind of treating ingredients as like materials, and then kind of thinking about the supply chain of them, and sourcing, and all this stuff.

And this goes into growing up on the farm and being really close to a lot of really valuable produce, and dairy farmers, and all this stuff. So, I was like, "How do I be really intentional with what I’m using, and what boundaries do I want to use when I’m making things?"

But I love cooking, so when I look at a recipe, I’m like, "How can I make this for me, or like make it different?" And that’s where a lot of the mapping goes into.

LAUREN GILGER: This idea of recipe mapping is very interesting. What will that look like?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah, there’s like ratios for all the the recipes, and then there’s kind of a background of a kind of food science where, you know, you’re substituting carbs or proteins or whatever to get the same end result. So, there’s a way to do that with tech that I’m trying to explore. And then there’s also, I’m going to call it for lack of a better term, metadata associated with a recipe, location source, and like the history of it, and all this other stuff, so you can kind of imagine like a map of tracing how food is all connected, or like like a timeline, if you will.

If you think of the Decolonize Your Diet movement, there’s like ingredients native to land, so there’s like this first layer of dishes that you can explore tied to geographical region. And then as time goes by, and people start trading amongst each other over larger distances, they’re introduced to different ingredients and techniques, and then you can kind of see how food has evolved to what it is now.

When I’m at Grand Canyon, I’ll be exploring the the native plants of the region, particularly because we have native roots in that area, but also because my great-grandmother’s the story is that if you wanted to make her happy, you’d give her a bag of piñon nuts.

She really loved them, and I really I thought it would be really special to make ice cream with those nuts that I can’t really find very easily. You can find them online, but I don’t really know anything about them as an ingredient, so just go there, get them, and learn from the people that have been living off of them for as long as they can remember.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And the Grand Canyon seems like it’s a really good place to kind of to do all of this, to connect these things.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Also, just like an incredibly iconic place. What are you looking forward to most? I mean, you get to live at the Grand Canyon while you’re participating in this in this project, and while you’re kind of doing this research. How do you think that will shape, contribute to, maybe change the way you think about some of this research and work that you’re doing?

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: It’s an interesting question because right now I’m just like, "I can’t believe my backyard is going to be the South Rim, and I’m going to be able to look over the Canyon." And I remember we got to stop by, my brother and I, and kind of do a quick glance at the at the Canyon when we went out there for my grandmother’s funeral, so I’ve been before, and I was just enamored by the sheer scale of the Canyon.

And I don’t know where where that’s going to take me when I’m there for, you know, two months, and I’m trying not to set too many expectations, but I’m also getting really excited just to be there and to be in the Southwest and like exploring the different microclimates in the areas, and what plants grow in those climates, and how that changes the the diet.

LAUREN GILGER: Sounds like you have a lot to look forward to.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, we’ll leave it there. That is Alessandra Vertrees, a multidisciplinary artist, as well as a software engineer and a food storyteller. Alessandra, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Good luck with this. It sounds like an incredibly beautiful opportunity.

ALESSANDRA VERTREES: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.