Vik Muniz CandyBAM

Vik Muniz’s gigantic gingerbread house, a photographic blow-up of an actual gingerbread cake, comes complete with frosting windows, jellybean arches, gummy bear cornices, and an m&m frieze. Reproducing BAM’s beaux arts architectural minutiae in detail—from its grand two-story stained glass windows down to the names of famous composers—Muniz (b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil) has changed the familiar landmark into a tantalizing, lighthearted fairy tale. Muniz’s CandyBAM wrapper will conceal restoration work, creating a sense of anticipation even as it preserves and exaggerates our memory of the building beneath.

For CandyBAM, Muniz worked with Soutine Bakery to match the exact scale of BAM’s building. At 300 feet long and 60 feet tall, CandyBAM is the most ambitious example of a large body of photographic work that Muniz has made using food or other unusual substances to depict a familiar object or scene. Typically, the materials he uses add a layer of meaning to the object depicted. With CandyBAM, the significance of his mouthwatering materials is concise and exuberant: “The symbolic meaning of the gingerbread house is the celebration of the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a place of fantasy and joy,” Muniz has said. “I would also like it to give the public the feeling of anticipation—just like a child feels in front of a bag of candy—of the unveiling of the renovated building.”