Mattress Factory is presenting Red Gold, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Cairo-based artist Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991). Rooted in research conducted in Egypt’s Nile Valley, Red Gold transforms the museum’s gallery into a meditation on food, labor, and globalization through the simple sun-dried tomato. In Egypt, rows of bright red Roma tomatoes dry under the Mediterranean sun, their market value rising more than twenty-fold as they shrink in size and grow in economic importance. Dubbed “red gold,” this export commodity embodies the contradictions of tradition and modernization, foreign aid and economic precarity, local labor and global agribusiness. For Mattress Factory, El Meleegy takes salt, the essential element of tomato preservation, as her central sculptural medium. Mixed with water and cornstarch and cast into custom molds, salt tiles