Serving Up Fresh Art

kleisk — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 16:51:11 +0000

Serving Up Fresh Art kleisk Friday, October 20, 2023

Clare Crespo '90 uses food as the connective tissue in her diverse body of artwork

Friday, October 20, 2023

Clare Crespo’s calendar hangs on my kitchen wall. Unlike any other calendar I’ve ever had, the months are loose from one another, held together by a colorful binder clip. The pages are 27 by 13 inches, on 100# Pacesetter Silk Text White. Each year’s Hurray Today calendar has a different food theme. Last year’s featured pen and ink drawings of beverages by Crespo '90 for every month. This year’s theme is vegetables.

For one month, Crespo drew cabbage, black-eyed peas, and chili peppers in the symmetry of a mandala. She draws by hand each date along with date markers in script. She includes traditional holidays along with the occasional TGIF, meteor shower, Dolly Parton’s birthday, and “Have a hot chocolate.” I buy her calendars every year and save them.

Crespo sells her Hurray Today calendars in the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, both in Los Angeles, and in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. She sells it around the world from her website.

“It’s so wild to think of it hanging in France or Japan,” she says.

The calendar is but one part of Crespo’s creative work. She has a line of dinnerware and ceramics, and she stars in a cooking show. She made a life-sized giraffe sculpture for a Madison Avenue store.

Clare Crespo '90 uses food like this burger that she made as a language to communicate her art to a wide range of people.

Crespo, who lives in Los Angeles, grew up the daughter of an art professor and an interior designer. She and I both grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and worked at the same summer camp before we entered �԰�� in Fall 1986. When we were high school seniors, she wore an eyeball ring that caught my attention, mainly because her mother made a fuss about her distaste for it.

At �԰��, Crespo majored in communication. “I was the program director for the TV station one semester, which was super fun. I remember going into the vault of all the available shows one could put on the schedule. I was really into the documentary about glassblowing and used to put it on the schedule all the time. I wonder who was watching that,” she says. “I hope they liked it!”

She recalls a research paper on Sesame Street and an art class project led by a visiting professor from Japan. “I did this one piece where I was sending dollar bills through the post to dead letter addresses all over the world. They would come back from their trips, and their travel felt so magical to me,” she says.

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 minored in painting at �԰�� and took a class from the late Robert Tiemann, professor emeritus of art, her last semester. She painted things in motion: “cars driving, animals swirling, stuff like that,” she says.

She was set to return to Baton Rouge after graduation to work at a television station, where she had painted weather maps. Tiemann asked her, late in the semester, what she wanted to do.

“I really want to push you,” he told her. “I want you to really think about what you love doing.”

Crespo told him she imagined her paintings moving. She thought that was weird and wondered how that connected to her next step after �԰��. Tiemann 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 says. He encouraged her to apply to grad school, late in that process. Tiemann helped her with her portfolio, and Crespo was admitted into the California Institute of the Arts, “by the skin of my teeth,” she says.

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 got her MFA and found her niche producing music videos in Los Angeles. In 2000, Crespo left her career as an executive producer of a production company to pursue a dream—a cooking show for children.

Crespo created a fun spaghetti with eyeballs recipe for her book The Secret Life of Food.

She started with a website, hoping that would turn into a show, but instead, it became a book, The Secret Life of Food, which was published by Disney-Hyperion in 2002. It included a Jello-O aquarium with Swedish fish, Anatomical Heart Cookies, and Sushi Cupcakes. The book sold well enough to have multiple printings, and Crespo made it on the Food Network and Good Morning America.

Her next book, Hey There, Cupcake!, came out two years later, just before that wave hit. Food became a language for Crespo to communicate her art to a wide range of people, beyond galleries. She created the Yummyfun Kooking Show in her garage in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. A production company picked it up and created several episodes featuring Crespo as Yummy Clare alongside puppet friends and guests such as John C. Reilly.

She has run a pop-up bakery and has crocheted oysters. She is married to James Chinlund, a production designer for film. They have an 18-year-old daughter.

Crespo crocheted a bounty of staples of Louisiana cuisine, including oysters, shrimp, crab, and a po' boy with Tabasco sauce.

People remark to Crespo how fun it must be to create. She thinks about the discipline that’s required to put her art into the world. “There’s not a big company going, ‘You know, you need to finish the calendar by this day.’ I have to drive myself,” she says.

When she reflects on �԰��, she is grateful for Robert Tiemann.

“There are those times in your life where you can see that you were standing at a crossroads, and somebody sparked your fire,” she says.

Alumni

Sonny Marks '90

Sonny Marks '90 lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and can be reached at sonnymarks320@gmail.com. When he’s not practicing law, he enjoys playing tennis and reading with his grandsons.

Sonny Marks '90

Serving Up Fresh Art

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