Ice Cream for Guglie

by Leah Rosenberg

For years, Tony Cragg’s Guglie was the first artwork we would see as we emerged from the elevator and out into the SFMOMA rooftop pavilion.  For months, we had been thinking about building a striped frozen mousse using a cone shaped mold, but we had to be practical about time and freezer space.  With the Robert Frank show about to come down (and therefore our float), another ice cream based treat to replace it was on our minds.

Tony Cragg, Guglie, 1987; wood, rubber, concrete, metal, stone, and plastic; dimensions variable; The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Tony Cragg

Sometimes the artwork would tell us what it needed to be and this time it begged us to be an ice cream cone.  In this case, the perfect flavor and hue of ice cream already existed, so it didn’t take much to call up our friends at Humphry Slocombe to send over a couple of buckets of their Strawberry Sorbet (Salted Caramel replaced this in the winter) and Malted Milk Chocolate to match the sculpture. Our true work would lie then on creating a custom cone wrapper (and eventually, on the warm days, non stop ice cream scooping).

Here is Caitlin’s first test. Turns out some extra math was required, as we needed the stripes to match up just right.

Where we would often find ourselves toiling away in the kitchen testing recipes, trying to get flavors and textures just right, this time we brought out the paint box to engineer a custom sleeve so we could transform what was once was a brown sugar waffle cone into… a Cragg cone!

Photo:  Charlie Villyard

Before Modern Art Desserts (the book) came along, a photographer from the SFMOMA had been the primary chronicler of our desserts. Charlie Villyard, member of the installation crew and talented photographer, would come up every few months and document all of the goodies we had been making. And one of our very favorite shots he ever took was this one of our Tony Cragg ice cream cone.

Here he is, doing whatever needs to be done to get the shot right. But quickly, before the ice cream melts!

Since the Cragg piece was installed in the pavilion and not the main galleries, it was one of the rare occasions in which you could eat the dessert you ordered right in next to the artwork that inspired it.  An even rarer occasion was purposefully scooping ice cream directly onto the floor!

After a visit to SFMOMA from LA, a relative of mine gave me this.  He had saved his cone wrapper, collaged it onto a photograph he took of the Tony Cragg piece and put it in a frame.

Sometimes a sculpture inspires an ice cream cone.  Sometimes an ice cream cone inspires a collage.

You can see the Cragg Cone (in its upright state) and the recipe on page 155 of Modern Art Desserts. And in case you want to dress your cones this summer in stripes, we made a template that you can download here.