Nutella Pusey
A Philly Afternoon
As a child, my mother always supported my ice cream obsession through her grocery shopping habits. I could get a gallon of whatever brand was on sale—Breyer’s, Turkey Hill, or Friendly’s were usually ShopRite’s markdown victims. Occasionally, I would try a new flavor but I would usually get something I knew I liked, like birthday cake or cookies and cream. After all, puberty had enough surprises.
But my mother rarely bought toppings. Sprinkles, jimmies, and caramel sauce were never in the sales paper. I made due by picking flavors with robust fillings. The one topping I always wanted, no matter my mother’s reasonable reasoning, was the chocolate sauce that would freeze and create a shell around your misshapen spoonfuls of delight.
My mother’s reasoning for not buying this bougie chocolate sauce was, “We have chocolate syrup at home.” She was correct. It took us about six months to finish chocolate syrup because we (me and my two siblings) were not greedy children in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.1 Chocolate syrup is also more versatile than the shell sauce. You can put it in milk. Remember the hey day of Got Milk?
When Nutella took over Tumblr and became the pantheon of food spread fads, my mom bought it but I was wary. I don’t like any spread designed for bread that doesn’t come from abusing domesticated animals, respectfully. Peanut butter, yuck. Almond butter, yuck. Fluff, grow up.
So tasting Nutella was sensory overload. It’s smooth and doesn’t get stuck in the back of your throat like peanut butter. It’s nutty but not like Brittany Murphy in a Girl, Interrupted (1999) way. More like a man is tweaking on the A-train and you turn the music down in your headphones to hear him out because you overhear him say, “We wouldn’t have so many immigrants if we didn’t go over there and fuck up their countries.” And the tweaking man doesn’t have a weapon. So he’s worthy of a semi-captive audience.
Just the right kind of nutty. A safe nutty.
Most importantly, when you put Nutella in ice cream, it hardens. It makes little Nutella chunks. So my mom would buy Nutella for breakfast toast and I would use it to make a little chocolate shell effect in my ice cream. Win-win.
Outside of gelato shops, it is hard to find hazelnut ice cream. It’s even harder to find hazelnut chocolate ice cream. 1-900-ICE-CREAM dropped this cosmic brownie Nutella soft serve swirl option and this was the actual song go the summer that everyone was searching for.
This flavor was the perfect ending of a magical afternoon. It was a sienna, nostalgic blend of sweetness. Before this treat, I went to the ICA Philadelphia to see Mavis Pusey’s show, Mobile Images. This is the first museum survey of the Jamaican abstract artist and is open until December 7. Admission is free and the museum is open from 12pm-6pm on Wednesday through Sunday.
I found myself spellbound by the abstraction of urban forms. After returning from Europe in 1968, Pusey was inspired by the construction, machinery, and destruction of buildings that make up the NYC soundscape and landscape.
Abstraction really has really had a “moment” in the art world the past five or so years. Abstraction is hard to “get” to some non-art people who feel like abstraction is created in some sort of intellectual code. But abstraction just requires you to respond emotionally. Abstraction is often just depicting how something feels, to the artist then to yourself as the viewer.
Abstraction asks you to bring your life experience to the artists’ brush strokes and blocks of color. That is the freedom within this field of art.
It was refreshing to see Black abstraction because in the current state of the world, it seems that we are going backwards in the possibilities of Black art. Black figuration, such as portraits, are pretty conservative. Yet in tumultuous times, the simple existence of a depiction of a Black figure is seen as radical just for existing. This was exemplified when Amy Sherald canceled her show at The Smithsonian due to their request to exclude her portraits of Black trans people. You cannot tell the subject of the portrait is transgender just from looking at it but here we are.
The show has since been mounted at the Baltimore Museum of Art but I want to live in a world where all Black forms of expression can flourish and be visible. I want the radical to actually be radical and not just Black people painted with black paint. I want art that focuses on the interiority of being alive.
I want women artists to get flowers (more flowers) when they’re alive. Mavis Pusey lived from 1928 to 2019.
This work on paper by Pusey reminds me of Alexander Richard Wilson’s work. Wilson is a Black queer artist that works in Denver. They paint the pulchritude of the Colorado landscape and also document how the landscape is impacted by gentrification and corporate greed.
The never ending expressions of Black expression are inspiring—whether it’s urbanism, mountain ranges or grocery lists.
Socioeconomically, there should be children of color in those movies. But if you clock into that woke AND socioeconomic part of your brain, you’ll remember that most government assistance goes to white people. White people clocking their own people. The original January 6th!