The Potato Eaters are a group of four artists inspired by peasant painter, Vincent Van Gogh, whose first large-scale painting with multiple figures was The Potato Eaters. Van Gogh spoke of the potato eaters as leading "a way of life completely different from ours, from that of civilized people," and tried to convey the idea that they had "used the same hands with which they now take food from the plate to dig the earth."

The current Potato Eaters consist of four artists: Andrea Avery, Nina Ganci, Frank O'Brien, and Rebecca Stees. Part of a decade long bio-social project studying the stigma of being underground and having dirt under their fingernails, their groundbreaking experiments with soot and grime have uncovered art in locations as mundane as their own backyards and as exotic as the crevices of their dusty faces.

The group inadvertently formed on the campus of Webster University. Stees explains, "We were huddled together in the printmaking studio digging up repressed memories and sharing a bag of potato chips when we uncovered a chip that resembled the face of former vice president Dan Quayle. The discovery led to a fascination with the tuber that has lasted over a decade," ironic considering the controversy surrounding Quayle's misspelling of the word "potato" during his term.