THE FORTUNE COOKIES : CRISIS ART

HUNDREDS are staging an edible artwork that speaks of current unrest. It is a quiet homecoming : a mound of fortune cookies on a Havana rooftop overlooking a wide, green river.

Art lovers come in ones and twos, cracking open cookies to read their fortunes, sometimes popping the treats into their mouths.

The cookie pile is part of ''Untitled'' [Fortune Cookie Corner], a 1990 work by Felix Gonzales-Turres that has been installed, mid-pandemic, as a collective work in hundreds of locations around the world.

It is the first work by Gonzales-Torres, who was born in Cuba but identified as American, to be made on the island, according to the Felix Gonzales-Torres Foundation.

''It's like he's here, looking at Cuba, at the landscape, at his orishas,'' said Jorge Fernandez Torres, the director of Cuba's National Museum of Fine Arts, referring to the deities of Santeria, the syncretic religion practised by many Cubans.

Mr. Fernandez, who spoke by phone from Havana, was one of the 1,000 people invited by Andrea Rosen Gallery and David Zwirner Gallery to participate in the project.

The work, which Mr. Fernandez installed on May 26 above the studio of the Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto, ''emits a kind of vibration,'' he said, adding, ''It gives me goosebumps.''

[Untitled ''Fortune Cookie Corner] originally involved 10,000 cookies and was one of the first in a series of edible sculptures mainly made from candies.

The two galleries, which represent the artist's estate, invited friends, artists, curators and fans of  Gonzales-Torres's work to create a collective installation, each piling 240 to 1,000 cookies and exhibiting from May 25 to July 3. The piles were to be replenished once, later one weekend.

Ms. Rosen said she came up with the project in April, when much of the world was locked down, hoping that it would prompt people to reflect on notions of public and private space, loss and regeneration, and the value of our existence when we are shut away at home.

Gonzales-Torres, who was born in Guaimaro, Cuba, in 1957, but left as a child, spent much of his career in New York.

Apparently simple - a stack of paper, a pile of candies, a beaded curtain - Gonzales Torres work is ''made to make complications,'' Mr. Rosen said.

The World Students Society thanks author Victoria Burnett.