An Artist Who Uses Food as Her Canvas

Jennifer Rubell creates participatory artwork that is a hybrid of performance art, installation, and happenings.

 

Artist Jennifer Rubell uses food as her canvas to create culinary concoctions carved straight out of a hedonist's dream. With a near demented sensuality, her installations, for example at the Brooklyn Museum and Simon de Pury's wedding, combine an appreciation for the rustic with a knack for the avant-garde: unctuous meats, glittering displays, an exact chocolate replica of Jeff Koons' rabbit sculpture, all to extravagant, delicious effect.

Rubell's penchant for the lush life has her positioned next to prime players in the industry, like Mario Batali as the vegetable butcher at his grandiloquent Eataly. We speak to the daughter of collectors Don and Mira Rubell on location at her home and at Eataly in New York to learn just what drives her voracious appetit