She always buys the same 89-cent white bread from the bottom shelf at Kroger. Between the slices, she spreads Bonne Maman raspberry preserves and Krema crunchy peanut butter.
Rose Schlemmer has developed the art of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich since she began making it for her school lunches in the eighth grade. She has eaten a PB&J every day for lunch for the last 10 years. Now a second-year master’s student in the fine arts program, she has turned her daily routine into a work of art.
“It’s perfect,” Schlemmer said. “I’ve perfected it to the point where everything is right. You’re not going to get the wrong mixes of anything, you’re not going to get soggy bread or things that are falling apart.”
The jam she uses has stayed consistent since her middle school years, but her taste in peanut butter has matured in recent years, she said. She would use Peter Pan crunchy, which was sweet as candy, but now she prefers Krema.
“I want that mellow taste so that I can really get the tones of the jam,” Schlemmer said. “It has a lot of nuttiness to it, so you have a bit of savory with the sweet jam.”
Schlemmer realized she completes each step of the process exactly the same way every day and started to question what that says about her as a person, she said.
She puts two spoonfuls of jam on one piece of toasted bread — it’s toasted so as to not sacrifice the bread by keeping it from absorbing the jam — and spreads an eighth of an inch of peanut butter on another.
The folding and turning of the aluminum foil she uses to package her sandwiches, how she folds the foil to look like a Christmas present and how she always puts the peanut butter slice on top of the jam slice and not vice versa — these things never change.
“I do a lot of things on routine, because I feel like that’s the only organization I can get in my life,” Schlemmer said. “Otherwise, things are really flexible. Things come flying at me a lot, so to calm that chaos down I like to have a little bit of organization.”
Most of the disorganization in her life comes from art, she said. Art is always changing. Lunch to her has become an island of calm routine in an otherwise amorphous life, happening at the same time and for the same duration every day.
She decided to make her sandwich process into an art piece for one of her art classes this February.
“I realized that peanut butter and jelly had become part of my identity and personality,” Schlemmer said. “I wanted to speak about who I am as a person through my everyday tasks. Presenting it in a performance and showing them my everyday tasks gave them a sense of who I am and what I do everyday to define myself.”
The presentation consisted of her making 17 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one for every student in the class. She said sharing this part of her daily life with them felt like giving them each a part of herself.
Afterward, she realized how much it meant about her as a person. Her routine shows how loyal of a person she is, she said.
“I think it brings out my personality,” Schlemmer sad. “Once I fall in love with something or enjoy working with a material or eating something, I just stick to it.”
Even within the freedom of artwork, she has built parameters of order for herself. She typically works with the same materials — silicone, enamel and metal — over and over again. She works with the same themes, body and memory, repetitively as well.
After watching her spread peanut butter and jelly over 34 slices of bread, her classmates started talking about what defines art, she said. They questioned if all reality is just a performance, if everything you do in your daily life is for other people to observe.
“Everything can be art, it’s just the way that you decide it to be,” Schlemmer said. “You can find something more important in something ordinary, but you have to give it that importance.”
