Eric Carle Museum Showcases Role of Food in His Work

The Carle will open a new exhibition later this month exploring Eric Carle’s career through the perspective of food. 

Cooking with Eric Carle, running September 20 through August 23, 2026, at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, will feature more than 50 works dating from 1965 to 2019. 

Food played a big role in launching Eric Carle’s career in book publishing which began with Red Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie, a compilation of folk recipes from across the United States. When he switched over to his signature collage style, Carle continued to feature food in many of his books, often highlighting his own favorite foods and personal stories.

“I have often fantasized about being a chef,” Eric Carle wrote to a fan who asked him if he ever wanted to be something other than an artist. He learned his love of food from his paternal grandmother, and many of Carle’s stories are inspired by his childhood memories and relationships.

The exhibition will examine the role of food in Carle’s work such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar through three thematic sections. Making Meals, Sharing Stories will feature work from some Carle classics, including Pancakes, Pancakes! which celebrates the art of starting a meal from scratch. On view will be a double-page spread illustrating the steps to making homemade pancake batter. Carle enjoyed making pancakes for breakfast before sitting down to work, a tradition from his childhood in Germany where he would ask his mother for pancakes after gathering an egg and jam from his grandmother’s kitchen.

Carle’s Uncle Walter owned a bakery who inspired Walter the Baker (1995), a story about how pretzels came to be. A tribute to his uncle and a nod to German folklore tradition, work on view from Walter the Baker shows how Carle painstakingly cut out each individual shape of the baked goods in Walter’s shop, including every single roll and pretzel.

The section Playing with Your Food will feature humorous situations involving food. In Twelve Tales From Aesop (1980), one of Carle’s most intricate collage endeavors, a crow falls prey to a fox’s fake praises. When he opens his beak to respond, his tasty meal of sausages falls right into the fox’s lap. Carle departed from his usual collage style to create pen-and-ink artworks for Otter Nonsense by Norton Juster (1982) with whom he shared a love of word play. On view is a playful image of an otter floating in the sea while enjoying cake and coffee which became the title page illustration.
 
The final section, Oodles of Doodles, shares some of the many informal drawings that Carle created throughout his life. He sketched thank-you notes on receipts and created abstract works on the lids of yogurts, his daily afternoon snack. Carle also loved honey, especially sweet and spicy pine honey that he imported from Europe, and he featured the treat in My Very First Book of Food (1986). Artworks on view from this book, which are among some of Carle’s smaller and more delicate pieces, show how he creatively divided the board-book format into split vertical pages, challenging pre-literate readers to match two illustrations together.

The exhibition is co-curated by Isabel Ruiz Cano, Rachel Hass, and Courtney Waring.