Open Kitchen is a Milwaukee collective founded in 2016 by Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen, in partnership with Alan Medina. Through events, installations, residencies, and seasonal research projects, they use food as a lens on ecology, identity, land, and community, bringing artists, growers, cooks, and neighbors together around shared tables and shared questions.

Fridge Cultures was composed in spring 2026 as a timestamp of the collective's ephemeral activities. The fridge holds active fermented cultures alongside a social culture of artists working with food and landways: a sourdough mother tended by collective members, a yogurt culture from an artist residency in Istanbul, and a double-cream Colby developed by a local artist and creamery. These ferments sit beside "XCellarator Pickles," an experimental pickling cooperative preserving the seasonal diversity of Milwaukee gardens. Though seemingly still, the composition is a microcosm of an ecological proposition: that the margins of what we digest can shape culture.

Fridge Cultures is part of Power of the Margins, Sculpture Milwaukee's 2026 exhibition, and is co-presented with the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists. Medina and Christensen are 2025 Nohl Fellows. Since 2020, Open Kitchen has been in residence at Lynden, where they steward a cultural garden and apiary integrating Indigenous environmental knowledge.