A master barista will offer tastings and advice at a one-time-only MFA event this summer
“Coffee is as complex as wine, probably more complex than wine,” said Giorgio Milo, master barista in residence at Illy, an 85-year-old Italian, family-owned coffee company with products in 140 countries across five continents.
Milo, a 22-year Illy veteran who serves as its educator in North America, is traveling to Boston this summer to teach Bostonians about coffee for a Museum of Fine Arts program called “Coffee Origins.”
The July event is the latest in a series of “remix” programs the museum has created to provide a fresh perspective on the museum’s art. Previous remixes have incorporated the Broadway hit musical Hamilton, the film Beauty and the Beast, and, most recently, the Star Wars series, and they’ve all sold out.
The MFA decided to partner with Illy for this one after the company approached the museum with an idea to do an educational program, said Justina Crawford, the MFA’s manager of lectures, courses, and concerts. The museum serves Illy coffee in its cafe, she said, and the coffee company is connected to the art world.
Illy began selling coffee cups created by international artists through the Illy Art Collection in 1992. On May 13 of this year, American artist Robert Wilson launched an art installation called “The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon Everything You Can Think of Is True” at the Magazzini del Sale in Venice, honoring the 25th anniversary of the Illy Art Collection. The exhibit runs through July 16.
A cup created by artist Emilio Pucci for the Illy Art Collection.
For the 90-minute, one-time-only MFA program, museum curators Dennis Carr and Tom Michie will display never-before-viewed coffee-related objects, describing their origins and how they were used throughout history, Crawford said.
“We will be taking some coffee vessels out of storage, which is neat because these are objects people haven’t seen,” Crawford said. “I can’t even tell you what [the objects will be] currently, because we’re still planning.”
Crawford said the coffee items are part of the museum’s permanent collection of nearly 500,000 objects. Because only 20 percent of the museum’s collection is on display at a time, people have not yet seen these.
Milo will talk about the history of coffee and preside over a coffee tasting, offering MFA guests three different coffees from three different parts of the world: Brazil, Ethiopia, and Guatemala.
“What I like to show them, or teach them, is how to use their senses when we taste something,” Milo said. “Taste is just a little piece of the whole experience. I like to explain to them that the flavor that we perceive is a combination of taste and aromas and many other sensations of our body.”
With that in mind, Milo recommends that coffee drinkers close their eyes while sipping.
“Sight is the most powerful sense we own,” Milo said. “So I always suggest we close our eyes when we taste something so we can focus on the other sensations, not the information that comes from your eyes.”
Unlike previous remix programs that moved visitors from one area of the museum to another, the entirety of this program will take place in one room, the museum’s Riley Seminar Room, Crawford said.
“We hope to, in that space, create a coffee house,” she said.
There will also be a question-and-answer session at the end of the program.
“I think it’s always interesting to talk about these iconic household items,” Crawford said. “It’s a part of a ritual that we have. Everyday life is an art. We all have a choice of what our daily practices are, and I think habitual practices are an art form.”
“Coffee Origins” will take place on Thursday, July 20 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets cost $10 for members and $12 for non-members. Thirty tickets are being sold for the event, and they can be purchased here.
465 Huntington Ave.; Boston; mfa.org
