The Secret Life of Food
Clare Crespo uses cuisine as the connective tissue in her diverse body of artwork
Clare Crespo’s “Hurray Today” calendar hangs on my kitchen wall. I’ve been buying her calendar collections, and saving them, for several years. When we were high school seniors in Baton Rouge, I remember that she wore an eyeball ring on her hand, and that her mother made a fuss of her distaste for it.
Unlike any other calendar I’ve ever had, the months are loose from one another, held together only by a colorful binder clip. The pages are 13”x17”, on 100# Pacesetter Silk Text White. Each year’s “Hurray Today” calendar has a different food-adjacent theme. Last year’s featured illustrations of beverages. This year’s theme is vegetables. Eat the rainbow, as they say.
For January’s page this year, Crespo drew cabbage, black eyed peas, and chili peppers in the symmetry of a mandala. The date markers are hand drawn, and she includes traditional holidays along with the occasional TGIF, meteor shower, Dolly Parton’s birthday, and “Have a hot chocolate.”
Sold all across the globe—including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans—the calendar is but one small part of Crespo’s diverse body of creative work. Her creations range from a life-sized giraffe sculpture for the window display at Studio Shamshiri on Madison Avenue to the green, fuzzy mascot of the now-defunct clothing brand Entireworld, which appeared in a series of short films with Kirsten Dunst. Through collaborations with Los Angeles ceramicist Heather Levine, Crespo developed a line of dinner ware, as well as a collection of flower vases painted with lesser-known pollinators. The series, titled Unsung Pollinators sold out in no time at all.
Though she now calls Los Angeles home, Crespo grew up in Baton Rouge, the daughter of late LSU art professor Michael Crespo and interior designer Helaine Moyse. The fall after she graduated from Episcopal High in 1986, we started college together at Trinity University in San Antonio—where she majored in communication and minored in painting. She spent the fall semester of her junior year studying in Italy. She loved it to the point that she burned her plane ticket home.
"Crespo realized food could be a language to communicate her visual art to general audiences." —Sonny Marks
Her last semester at Trinity, she took a painting class, where she started creating things in motion: “cars driving, animals swirling, stuff like that,” she said. Her plan after graduation was to return to Baton Rouge to work at WRBT-TV, then Baton Rouge’s NBC affiliate, where she had painted weather maps. But when her art professor, the late Robert Tiemann, asked her what she really wanted to do—she couldn’t get the moving art out of her mind.
Crespo told Tiemann she imagined her paintings moving. She thought that was weird, and wondered how it connected to her future. The professor told her, “If you’ll allow me to translate what you just said, I think you want to be an animator.”
“The clouds parted,” Crespo recalled. Tiemann encouraged her to apply to grad school, late in the process. She got admitted into the California Institute of the Arts “by the skin of my teeth.”
At CalArts, she made friends with classmates such as Stephen Hillenburg, who went on to create SpongeBob SquarePants. She played bass in a band with Beck David Hansen. When Beck made his video for “Loser” in 1994, Crespo was in it.
She completed her MFA and found her niche producing music videos in L.A.—climbing her way up to the position of executive producer at The Directors Bureau, and later at Satellite Films. In 2000, though, she left that career to pursue a new dream—a cooking show for children. The concept combined Crespo’s creativity with her love of sharing food.
She started with a website, hoping that would turn into a show, but instead it became a book. The Secret Life of Food was published by Disney-Hyperion in 2002 as a collection of recipes and photographs transforming easy-to-make dishes into everyday items that do not look like what we know to be food. It included a Jell-O aquarium with Swedish fish, Anatomical Heart Cookies, and Sushi Cupcakes. The book sold well enough to have multiple printings, with features on the Food Network and Good Morning America. Her next book Hey There, Cupcake! came out two years later, keeping the concept going with recipes for cupcakes that look like burgers, clocks, and panda bears.
Crespo realized food could be a language to communicate her visual art to general audiences. In her garage in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, she created the Yummyfun Kooking Show—which was quickly picked up by multinational production company Fremantle. The show featured Crespo as Yummy Clare alongside puppet friends, and guests the likes of John C. Reilly.
When Crespo creates with food, it can also be a way for her to express her deep-held connection to the food culture she grew up in. An example is the crocheted sculptural feast of Louisiana foods she orchestrated for a show at the Health Ceramics showroom in Los Angeles during Mardi Gras—which later traveled to New Orleans as part of the Prospect 3 Triennial in 2015. “I feel,” she said, “like I am often sending homesick love letters to my home state.”
So, what is she working on now, you might ask? The 2024 “Hurray Today” calendar, naturally.