The Last Course

“Diabetes has always created uncertainty with the way I live my life because of its changing nature. The added risk of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the reality that I cannot escape my mortality.”

A designer in the field of metalwork, Doug Bucci utilizes digital processes to explore and display biological systems and the effect of disease on the body, prompted by his experiences as a lifelong diabetic. This commission, The Last Course (2021), takes his vision to an unprecedented scale, forming a room-sized installation replete with an eighteenth-century-inspired table set for a dessert course. The table is densely laid with ostentatious wares, which in the 1700s would have been dripping with expensive confectionary delicacies.

The room invites temptation and foreshadows mortality since, for many diabetics, indulgence in sweets can lead to medical complications and possibly death. Exploring the enticing lure and potential danger of sugary treats, Bucci creates a room whose eerie appearance alludes to his own months-long stay at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a child due to his disease. Furthering the tension between the delectable and the disturbing, Bucci created various “sweetmeats” for the display by graphing their fleshly forms from molds of his own wounds. A moat on the table—a detail used at sumptuous eighteenth-century banquets to shuttle food around the table—emphasizes the ornate and indulgent ritual of consumption. As a whole, The Last Course acts as a self-portrait of the artist, conveying the provocation of his lifelong struggle and inviting us to walk the line between impulse and sacrifice, joining in and abstaining, healthfulness and disease, shared by 34.2 million diabetics in our country.

-Elisabeth Agro, The Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Last Course, 2021, by Doug Bucci (Commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Collection of the artist)