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From still life painters venerating heavenly fruits and vegetables to Gordon Matta-Clark doling out earthy provisions at his 1970s-era SoHo restaurant Food, artists have long communed with cooking and cuisine. Other examples abound: Giuseppe Arcimboldo making faces with foodstuffs in the 16th century, the Italian Futurists imagining strange meals involving sandpaper and ultraviolet rays, Rirkrit Tiravanija serving curry in museums, galleries, and restaurants today. With such edibly inclined ingenuity in mind, ARTnews visited several New York artists—and one of the art world’s favorite chefs—to see how food figures into their life and work.

During breaks from making lush paintings of such subjects as birds, flowers, and the moon, Ann Craven enjoys daily lunches with her studio assistants at her workspace and home (where she lives with her husband, artist Peter Halley) in Tribeca. “We all share a love of cooking, so it saves time to not go out,” Craven said. “It’s nice to stay here and make something out of nothing.” On a recent afternoon, she and her studio team made pasta with pear, gorgonzola, and radishes. “I see making food in the same manner as I see mixing paint,” Craven said of a process that is inevitably “filled with risks and humble mistakes, and needs no words—just eating!”