Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 2 of 9: The Year in Food Art

Apropos of Indiana, a cheese sculpture of a cow dunking a basketball, much as one might dunk a donut in her milk.

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: the annual cheese sculpture at the Agricultural & Horticultural Building. Each year sculptor Sarah Kaufmann spends days carving hundreds of pounds of cheese into recognizable, cartoony shapes. This year Kaufmann couldn’t make it; in her place the State Fair welcomed food artist Nancy Baker, whose works have appeared in such TV competitions as Food Network’s Halloween Wars and Disney+’s Foodtastic (hosted by Nope‘s Keke Palmer), and who in an episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show graciously made a pie with her celebrity interviewer’s face on it.

For this year’s model, Baker used 1,400 pounds of four kinds of cheddar to exemplify not only the farm-forward nature of the proceedings, but also the 2023 State Fair theme, “The Year of Basketball”. The all-star player floating above the basket with a cowhide-covered ball in hand is Buttercup, the mascot for the American Dairy Association Indiana.

Another tradition in the AgHort Building is the giant gourd contest. Most of the farm-food grow-off entrants that used to be displayed in the AgHort were moved to one of the other pavilions, but someone in charge knew the giant gourds were important to us and kept them in their usual digs.

A 1099-pound gourd on a fenced-in platform.

The 2023 winner, weighing in at a staggering 1,099 pounds.

Yet another AgHort tradition is the Canstruction contest. Its namesake is a charitable organization that holds nationwide events in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other in building the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Clearance Sale on Aisle 5”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families totally unaware their next few meals used to be Art.

We aren’t sports fans, but we knew just enough to enjoy these entries celebrating The Year of Basketball. I only had to look up one of them.

We’ll start simple: the NBA logo. In cans!

The logo of our hometown Indiana Pacers.

An approximation of the Pacers’ mascot Boomer.

I know slightly more about Chuck Taylor shoes than about the player himself.

Bugs Bunny from Space Jam, made of cans.

It’s Bugs Bunny in Space Jam…in cans!

Air Bud the basketball-playing movie dog and a basketball, made of cans.

It’s Air Bud…in cans!

A canned sculpture of Reggie Miller choking himself. Long story.

Remember the ’94 playoffs between the Pacers and the Knicks, when courtside ticketholder Spike Lee wouldn’t stop heckling Reggie Miller, who then shot five 3-pointers in the fourth quarter and heckled Lee back? They went there…in cans!