Jeffrey Allen Price’s business card declares he is a “Potato Artist” and shows him in a mask, with a potato for a mouth and what looks like dried potato roots for eyebrows—against the background of a burlap sack.

But when the East End Arts Council made Price current Artist-in-Residence and gave him one of Main Street’s empty storefronts (immediately west of the council) for an exhibit of “potato art,” it wasn’t just entertaining a fringe artist.

It was more an installation than an art exhibit. On October 16, a windy, sunny autumn Saturday, Pat Snyder, executive director of the East End Arts Council, opened the reception with “You’re here to see everything potato,” and introduced Price, who welcomed the small crowd to a room filled with innumerable things potato: walls papered with potato sacks, games such as a Dondi Potato Race, books with titles like Aristocrat in Burlap and Man Suffocated By Potato, photos (Marilyn Monroe with champagne and potato chips), toys like innumerable potato heads, T-shirts that said “THINK POTATO”—and on and on.

Price said, “Welcome to the Potato Institute.” He remarked that the east end of Long Island, especially Riverhead, with its longtime connection to potato farming, was the perfect place for everything he had gathered.

He held out a red potato. “Of course the first question is: Why the potato?”

For the next hour or so he answered that in many ways. On a personal level it was a confluence of such diverse influences of Van Gogh’s famous work The Potato Eaters, Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture philosophy, Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, and vegetarianism.

“The thing is,” he said, “the potato draws you in. You’re not intimidated by it. What other vegetable is so widely grown—in 180 countries—and also so much a part of popular culture? There’s ‘it’s small potatoes’; ‘it’s a hot potato’; ‘it hit me like a sack of potatoes.’” Price used the latter phrase when describing his own potato epiphany.

“You can literally live off potatoes. A potato has everything in it you need to survive,” said Price.

He remarked that “This living creature is part of our history,” and related how the potato had come from Peru—where it was often used as currency—to Europe, how it had to confront the stigma of belonging to the family of nightshades, how Thomas Jefferson had brought it to the United States, and how the potato blight that devastated Ireland brought so many of the Irish to America.

One of the sons of Erie was in the audience, an elderly loquacious man named Frank McArdle, who asserted “You never went a day in Ireland without eating potatoes,” and reminisced about the varieties there. He recalled planting fields with potatoes and the ringing of the village church bells signaling the time to stop for lunch.

Others offered their potato perspectives. Meryl Spiegel said in the 1980s her children were the only Jewish kids in school in East Quogue, and they felt overwhelmed and left out at Christmas. “So I made latkes—potato pancakes—and brought them to school; all the kids loved it. It was a bridge for my children to the rest of the class.”

John Lamor, who works for an architectural firm, pointed out that many of the designs built on the east end intentionally or subconsciously mimic old style potato barns.

Price, who is also a teacher of fine arts, says of himself, “I’m just one of a lineage of potato artists,” relayed that the time allotted the exhibit is up to the graces of the East End Arts Council. “Let them know if you want to see it last a while.”