Claire Rosen Brings Her Fantastical Feasts Series to Life at InLiquid with A Gathering of Goats

For more than a decade, Claire Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts series has placed live animals — cheetahs, elephants, hyenas, mice, goats — at elaborate banquet tables, photographed in compositions that explicitly reference Da Vinci’s Last Supper and the Dutch vanitas tradition. The work has anchored solo and group shows from New York to Seoul, drawn coverage in Architectural Digest, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Washington Post, and earned Rosen recognition on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” lists in both 2012 and 2013. On Tuesday, June 10, the series steps off the wall.

A Gathering of Goats — produced by InLiquid at the Icebox Project Space inside the Crane Arts Building, with the Philly Goat Project’s trained herd as collaborators — runs for one evening only, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The premise translates Claire Rosen’s photographic practice into live, three-dimensional installation: a sequence of vignettes in which a meticulously composed image is allowed to move, breathe, and respond. Tickets are available through InLiquid, and the venue’s capacity for genre-fluid programming will already be familiar to aX readers from earlier coverage of March for Art 2026 at the same gallery.

Inside Claire Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts at A Gathering of Goats

The evening unfolds as three discrete installations, each a translation of a specific Rosen compositional gesture into physical space. The Goat Feast presents the herd at a pastoral, storybook banquet — a direct three-dimensional callback to the Fantastical Feasts photographs that have previously taken Rosen from Sarajevo to the Amazon.

The Goat Art Studio invites guests to watch the goats produce original works on canvas and paper, with selected pieces available for purchase as part of the fundraiser. A whimsical photo opportunity completes the sequence, pairing each guest with one of the herd in what amounts to a one-night-only continuation of Rosen’s portrait practice. The vignettes are designed to be encountered, not observed; guests enter the photograph rather than view it.

Claire Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts: From Photograph to Live Installation

Rosen’s practice draws explicit lineage from Beatrix Potter’s anthropomorphic storybook tradition and from the meticulous symbolic excess of seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting — whimsy with classical bones. Her hallmark images, including birds posed against historical wallpaper and mass species portraits arranged at banquet tables, have appeared in Architectural Digest, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Washington Post. Her monograph Birds of a Feather earned a place on Smithsonian’s Top 10 Photo Books of 2025. She serves as a brand ambassador for FujiFilm USA. The Fantastical Feasts series, from which A Gathering of Goats draws directly, is ongoing rather than retrospective — meaning the evening at Crane Arts represents the series’ active extension into live theater.

The conceptual move is the genuinely new artistic territory. Claire Rosen has spent more than a decade building a body of work in which the photograph performs a precise iconographic function — animal as subject, banquet as iconography, composition as a vehicle for the symbolic. A Gathering of Goats is the first time that body of work walks. The installation does not document a Fantastical Feasts photograph; it is a Fantastical Feasts photograph that has not yet been taken, and may never be taken in the same way again. That distinction matters for an arts publication: the live evening is not a derivative event tied to the photographs but the photographs’ active extension into another medium.

Warwick Furnace Farm, the Philly Goat Project, and the Logic of A Gathering of Goats

Claire Rosen also serves as Creative Director of Warwick Furnace Farm, a historic Chester County property she has transformed into a working lavender farm with an artist studio, a gallery, and a growing artist residency program. That community-engagement-through-art ethos is what makes the InLiquid and Philly Goat Project partnership land as a logical extension of her broader practice rather than a one-off branded activation. As Claire Rosen has framed it in her own artist statement, the intent is to consider the animal kingdom more humanely — and at A Gathering of Goats, that intent moves from photographic frame to physical room.

The Philly Goat Project has, since its 2018 founding, engaged more than one million people in goat-assisted activities at The Farm at Awbury and across the greater Philadelphia region — a scale figure that reframes the organization from neighborhood novelty into a genuine wellness-and-education institution.

PGP partners with trained goats to deliver education, wellness, community engagement, and therapeutic programming, and proceeds from A Gathering of Goats directly support the Philly Goat Project’s wellness, education, and therapeutic programming. The conceptual move at the heart of the evening is the reframing of the goats themselves: by placing the herd at the center of a high-design cultural event rather than at the periphery of a fundraiser, A Gathering of Goats asks attendees to encounter these animals as collaborators in a work of art rather than its subject matter.

A Gathering of Goats: Event Details

A Gathering of Goats runs Tuesday, June 10, 2026, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Icebox Project Space, Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American Street, Philadelphia, PA. Guests sip Caprini-tinis — the evening’s signature drink, named for the Latin family caprinae — and savor goat-inspired canapés conceived by Philadelphia culinary consultant Lynn Buono, founder of Feast Your Eyes Catering. A whimsical photo opportunity invites attendees to pose with one of the herd. Tickets are available through InLiquid. A Gathering of Goats sits among the most conceptually distinctive entries on Philadelphia’s broader spring events calendar.