AT first glance the opening and dinner at the Allegra LaViola Gallery on the Lower East Side on Wednesday night looked like any other New York art event. There were stylish people from Brooklyn and Manhattan, in dark clothing and notable shoes. Photographs lined the walls. Thematically appropriate mood music — in this case, live drums — came from a corner of the gallery. Laura Ginn, the artist being celebrated, wore a one-shoulder, one-of-a-kind dress.

There was a bit of a stench coming off it, though. Ms. Ginn’s gown was made of rat pelts, 300 of them, that she had tanned and sewn together. Their tails encircled her abdomen; two rat faces met on her right shoulder. “I thought that was cute,” she said, and laughed. “They’re kind of kissing. I do anthropomorphize them sometimes.”

Ms. Ginn, 28, has made working with animals her métier since she graduated with an M.F.A. in photography from Cranbrook Academy in Michigan in 2010. A video looping on one gallery wall showed her dismantling a deer head in the rain. A photo presented a still life of pelts drying on a rack in her shower. And at this dinner the centerpieces, such as they were, were small piles of rat bones — a tiny section of rib here, a spine there. “They’re all from the rats you are enjoying,” Ms. Ginn said, as people sat down to eat at tables covered with faded American flags. The opening of her exhibition, “Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch,” centered on a multicourse meal in which the main ingredients, and aesthetic stars, were rats. The show runs until Aug. 3. Those easily queased should stop reading here.

Twenty people, mostly friends of Ms. Ginn or the gallery owner, Ms. LaViola, nibbled on goat cheese bruschetta topped with rat leg tenderloin, and rat-pork terrine encircled with beef fat, prepared by a chef after much trial and error with his proteins. The rats were shipped from a United States Department of Agriculture-approved West Coast processor that supplies pet owners with humanely killed, individually flash-frozen rodents, in classifications ranging from “jumbo” to “fuzzy.” Seventy five rats were skinned and cooked — and broiled and smoked and grilled — for the dinner, and most guests paid $100 each to attend, signing a liability waiver, some not entirely willingly.