Home for Dinner: Victoria Camblin, editor and artistic director of Art Papers

“I have so much to do I can’t possibly go out to a restaurant, but somehow taking time for a dinner at home is excusable if done under the specter of productivity.”
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Home for dinner, Victoria Camblin

Photograph by Raymond McCrea Jones

Stacks of paper—handwritten notes crammed onto a much-loved lined notebook, last Sunday’s New York Times, and a copy of André Masson and the Surrealist Self—cover Victoria Camblin’s midcentury modern dining table. Her schedule is just as chock-full. “I have so much to do I can’t possibly go out to a restaurant, but somehow taking time for a dinner at home is excusable if done under the specter of productivity,” says 33-year-old Camblin, who is the editor and artistic director of Art Papers, a nonprofit and a quarterly magazine that supports and examines contemporary art and culture. She often invites like-minded friends over for a thrown together “working supper” in her Woodland Hills bungalow. “I’m not going to pretend we don’t just eat over our computers most of the time!”

Tonight’s guest
Brandon Sheats, executive director of Murmur, a community organization that promotes DIY culture.

Waste not
“I often grocery shop ambitiously, and then I don’t end up eating all of my purchases. So, at the 11th hour, other people are called in to assist!”

On the menu
“It’s usually moderately healthy food with a Continental thrust.” Tonight it’s a smoked salmon frittata and a butter lettuce salad dressed in mustard-shallot vinaigrette.

On the table
In addition to books and laptops, Camblin makes room for flowers—Knock Out roses freshly snipped from both her own and her neighbor’s gardens, in this case—and loads of colorful dishes. “I have easily hundreds of mismatched china pieces, which all came from my grandparents’ house in north London. I’m not going to go buy more from Ikea. I just use all these weird little plates!” True to Camblin’s high-low aesthetic, paper towels serve as napkins.

This article originally appeared in our August 2017 issue.

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